This is chapter two of my novel. You can read part one here: http://justinpahl.blogspot.com/2012/07/education.html


　

　
The first post card arrived unexpectedly, two weeks after Tomas disappeared. It was faded, sepia, frayed around the edges. It looked as if it had been stolen from a flea market or an antique store. It was a black and white photograph of the Panama Canal during construction, when it was just a gaping gash cut in the rock. Dirty, broad men, their capillaries probably coursing with malaria, stand stone faced, holding their shovels, the endless work going on behind them. Dynamite and horses pulling carts and mules overloaded. Nothing was written on the back.

~

Xavi listened to the Grito from his bedroom. He smoked cigarettes. The whole city ascended into song, revelry, debauchery. He masturbated so often that eventually he couldn’t finish anymore and the pain was too overwhelming to continue. Fireworks exploded invisibly in the night; there was more singing. He drifted in and out of consciousness to the stray melodies of men coming home from bars.

Four weeks passed, more or less like this.

~

A month after Tomas vanished there was a knock at his door.

“Hello? Xavi, is this your place? Are you home? It’s Octavia.”

He held his breath and waited in silence. It had been days since he’d showered, but she wouldn‘t go away. He checked himself in his small mirror and emptied his ash tray out the window, reclaimed his chair from a heap of clothes. Piles of books still grew like weeds from the floor.

She came in and perused, drifting like a trade wind, stooping to look at some of the books, trailing her finger along the surface of his desk as if it were the surface of a lake and she were in a boat. She finally sat in the chair, crossing her legs, right over left. She had a poppy behind her left ear.

“Where do you get your books from?” she asked.

He shrugged. He was shirtless, wearing jeans.

“So you steal them.” She smiled and dipped her head sweetly, like a willow tree weeping in wind. “Coincidentally, so do I.”

“Really?” he asked with a hint of disbelief.

“I’m just as poor as you, kid. Maybe poorer.”

“Where do you steal from?”

“I like Galilee, up in Tierra Norte. Have you been?”

“No.” He stood against the door, arms akimbo.

“It’s this big, wonderful old barn. So disorganized, a clusterfuck of literature. And it’s just one old man in there. What a sweetheart he is.”

“So you steal from him.”

“He doesn‘t care. He’s older than dirt and he can barely see. I talk to him for hours sometimes. It’s like a dream being there. High ceilings and books as far as you can see. It reminds me of a novel in which the world has fallen to shit and all that’s left is this one library containing all the contents of human history. It’s lit by torches and fire. In my imaginary novel, of course.”

“I like Rodrigo’s.”

“But he’s such an asshole!”

“That’s why I steal from him.”

She laughed and she took the poppy from behind her ear and twirled it between her fingers. The sun came through the small window and penetrated the flower making it like a whirligig of parchment. Later, he would use that image in a poem in a way that was completely unattached from anything else in the poem. It contained no deeper metaphor or motif. It was possible, he decided that an image could be beautiful solely by existing, even without context.

“Are you here to ask about your poem?”

“I’m here to see how you’re doing, kid. Tomas is gone, you know.”

“I know.”

“No one knows where, or why, just in case you were wondering. He didn’t tell anyone. If he’d told anyone, it would have been you.”

Xavi didn’t say anything.

“Are you afraid of getting old?” she asked.

“I don’t think about it much.”

“You should. It’s all that matters in life, isn’t it? We’re young and beautiful and we wake up one day and our life is ruined. How sad, right? I think Tomas was very afraid of getting old, maybe more afraid even than me, and I‘m terrified of it. But I don‘t know. I have no idea why he left.”

She spent the rest of the night telling stories. She was fond of aphorisms and myths and apocryphal stories about famous figures. She told him a story about Freud and Niagara Falls. She told him a story about Beethoven and the approach of Napoleon‘s army. She told him about a famous writer in Spain whose liver was failing, and the immense, magnificent novel he was racing to finish before death devoured him. He won the race, of course.

“It wouldn’t be much of a story if he lost,” Xavi interrupted her.

“Oh, but wouldn’t it be better if he had, maybe? If all that was left were the fragments of a big, beautiful novel, forever unfinished, forever trailing off into oblivion?”

~

That night, after she finally left, he wrote his poem with the image of the meaningless flower and parchment. He spent the whole night and part of the morning at his desk, writing dissociated lines, images from the summer, from his childhood. The entire summer already felt no more or less real than a hallucination. It was as distant or close as his childhood. He wondered what images he was distorting, what memories had already been corrupted by the passage of time. What was the real thing? he wrote, The event, or the memory of the event. He looked at the lines for a few minutes and then erased them and wrote over them.

He felt a little better, having written, having talked to Octavia. He went to a quiet café down the street, owned by Miguel Pachucho, who was notorious in the neighborhood for his four beautiful daughters and for the iron hand with which he controlled their lives. Xavi only ever stopped by to see his youngest daughter, a preternaturally tall, dark skinned girl with straight black hair and two bottomless, cobalt eyes. She was far from the prettiest girl he’d ever seen. But there was something about her that he couldn’t put his finger on, a sorrowful radiance in the assured, melancholy way she held his gaze. It was true, she was young. Very young. Probably thirteen or fourteen. But there was a wisdom in her stoicism that few people attained. She understood her situation and her city’s situation and her species’ situation. Which was: All is shit except for love. And love is shit, too, just a slightly less squalid form of shit. Sometimes while Xavi poured his coffee, Miguel’s daughter would come over to switch out the old grounds, standing so close to him that he only needed to reach out a centimeter to touch her. This demarcated zone tormented him. He’d had dreams about just resting his palm her forearms, pale forearms that were blanketed with fine, dark hairs. The two of them would stand there, not speaking, barely moving, the girl towering over Xavi, so close that the slightest spasm of nerves would bring them together. It was the most exquisite form of torture he could imagine. Then she would walk back to the checkout counter where she would ring up him, and ask him how his poetry was going, and tell him about the books she was reading. She liked pulp novels and lyrical poetry. Sometimes he would give her recommendations, and she would write them down on scraps of receipt paper.

Xavi walked in and the girl wasn’t there. So he bought his coffee and bought a copy of the Journal for a Free and Peaceful Mexican Republic and left. The Journal was a newspaper he sometimes read, when he could find it. It was published irregularly, and difficult to find. Its length varied from issue to issue; sometimes it ran only four pages, and others it ballooned to nearly twenty. The articles were uneven, but the best of them were subversive and honest; as if the real journalists had suddenly started to work for free, or if they had started writing to save their very lives.

~
   
Xavi slept until after sundown. When he woke up he decided he wanted to write something from the summer. He wasn’t feeling poetic, so he wrote a brief piece of non-fiction and the next day he put it in an envelope and mailed it to Armando Rojas, the editor of the Journal for a Free and Peaceful Mexican Republic:

The silver mines on the Sierra Tarahumara have long been tapped dry. The companies that oversaw operations have moved off to their next conquest, leaving in their wake ruined machinery that is medieval in its menace. The once vibrant communities that thrived around the mines, places like Lobo del Grito and Rio de Cobre, have been desiccated. They now resemble the ghost towns of old Western lore.

While most residents have followed the industrial tide to the North, some have stayed behind. Their lives resemble those of prehistoric scavengers. They live in squalor. And they are haunted. As Mr. Calderon has flooded the traditional cartel conduits with his masked federalis, the drug runners have devised alternate routes to the border. Isolated from all but the most persistent lawman, these abandoned mining villages serve as the perfect safe houses.

But perhaps most terrifying for the residents are the voices in the night. From high in the hills, in the deepest hours of the night, there are often blood curdling screams that echo from the almost bottomless depths of the mines. No one knows their source. Some think that the mines have become dumping grounds for the increasingly violent cartel war. Others insist the voices are the ghosts of their ancestors. Some, those hopeful few, think that it is merely the wind.

After that he tried to write poetry, but found the route impossible, as if he were trying to find some ancient ruins in the middle of a jungle, but the ruins had been so overgrown and buried that there was no trace of them remaining. So instead he masturbated and went to sleep.

~

The next Wednesday Octavia visited again. She wore a tank top with no bra; for the first time he noticed that her chest was large and muscular and taut, the chest of a swimmer or pole-vaulter. She also wore turquoise and amber earrings that were shaped like fish. They talked about minor things, the weather and cafes they liked. She didn’t ask about his poetry or share any of hers. The copy of his last poem, with the parchment and the flower, sat on his desk untouched. He’d planned on giving it to her, but forgot, and when she left, earlier than the week before, he remembered about the poem and he walked briskly into the hallway hoping to catch her but she was already gone. He stayed up late walking along the cafes and bodegas of Calle Rio Azure Ojos. He didn’t think she would come by again. Why did he think this? It was something he felt in his gut, a gnawing voice in his intestines that told him she would never set foot in his apartment again and that he’d squandered his opportunity with her because he was boring and immature. How could they have exhausted conversation so quickly? The electrical current that had flowed beneath their previous encounters had suddenly vanished. He walked until nearly dawn, when the only other people out were whores or malandros or homeless or stray cats that slunk down the wet streets, picking like vultures at pieces of discarded trash.

~

Later in the week he went to the University of San Rafael and wandered the campus until he found Arturo Belano’s office. It was located on a middle floor in one of the old riot proof dorms built during the authoritarian fervor of the 1970’s. The building was a labyrinth of exposed concrete and chipped plaster. Two young girls were already in Belano’s office, and he was reading to them from a small chapbook of his that he’d published many, many years before, when he was riding the back roads of Chile with the revolutionaries and guerrillas. Xavi had difficulty imagining Belano with a weapon or an agenda other than himself. It was a poem about Belano’s time in a Chilean prison there, when he’d shat over an open hole and masturbated within sight of the guards and listened to fellow prisoners being tortured and executed in the night.

Belano finished and saw Xavi watching from the doorway.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

“I’m a friend of Tomas’.”

“Why are you here? I have no idea where he’s gone.”

“But you know he’s gone?”

“Of course. Everyone knows. This city is like a little goddamned village. Everyone knows everything. Are you a fucking imbecile or a migrant?”

The girls fluttered with laughter. Xavi stood dumbly in the doorway while Belano expected some kind of retort.

“He’s run off on some poetic quest, has he?” Belano inquired impatiently.

“I don’t know, professor.”

“Well, good. It’s not a quest if everyone knows where you are. The true writer works in silence, by cover of night. He doesn’t need eyes watching his every move. Only vain assholes work in broad daylight, where everyone can see the strain, the struggle. Then you‘re just putting on a show.”

At that moment Belano’s eyes, striated bands of brown, yellow, saffron, and green, struck Xavi as a reliquary of literary and sexual dreams. There were poems and books never written, women never loved or fucked, and the flimmering faith that he was still alive and the books might yet be written, the women might yet emerge at his doorstep and confess their desires. In a way, then, it made the girls, who were neither pulchritudinous or homely, relics or statues, their limbs and muscles and fluids ossifying in the moldering mausoleum of Belano’s tortuous, licentious memory. 

“Sit down,” Belano said ambivalently, “if you want.”

Xavi wavered in the doorway.

“Oh sit the fuck down, boy. Join us.”

He sat down. Belano passed him a flask. “Have a drink. I was just about to tell the girls about when I met Octavio Paz.”

“Is it true you called him a whore?” one of the girls asked. She had a gaunt, tight face. The prominence of her skeletal structure accentuated shadows so that her eyes were set back, dark and deep, and this gave her a ghoulish look. She wore a short floral skirt and elaborate boots nearly up to her knees.

“Well it’s true, partially. I didn’t call him a whore to his face.”

“Oh,” the girl, disappointed.

“I said it during a lecture that he was supposed to attend. But he didn’t attend. And when we met he told me that he’d heard about the lecture. He said, ‘What a man, whose insults travel farther than his poems.’” Belano grinned rakishly. “I told him that I sympathized greatly with whores. After all, I am a whore of the heart, and whoredom is just another form of searching for meaning, no different than art or money, just a means of feeling a little less lonely and a little less mortal. Then Paz laughed and took me out for a really nice dinner. It was on the coast somewhere, Yucatan, I think. Old Mayan temples in the jungle and fresh seafood. Or maybe in the mountains. Who cares?”

The fulsome girls laughed, and Belano threw them the flask. “Go on, a little more.”

“No, please no.”

Belano lifted his chin flamboyantly and the girls obliged him. Xavi didn’t know which one Belano was fucking or if he was fucking both of them, or maybe neither. Who could tell? To quote the professor, who cared?

“I’ll tell you,” Belano continued, “there’s nothing worse than being old and anonymous. Most people my age will tell you otherwise, but that’s because they’re even bigger failures at life than I’ve been. What’s the point of art if not to get famous and rich?”

“Beauty, of course!”

Belano sneered and held his hands out for the flask, which had come into Xavi’s possession.

“What can you buy with beauty?”

“Immortality,” the other girl said. She was not ghoulish but equine, her protruded gums and teeth the most memorable things about her.

“What’s the use of something you have to be dead to enjoy?”

“Self discipline, the rigor of hard labor. The rigors of form.”

Belano shrugged and tossed Xavi another flask, this one full. “Become a marathoner then. Join the military. Although not in this country, unless you want to become rich off the cartels and then dead. The institutions here are too gluttonous and flabby. Don’t glorify hard labor, boy. Have you ever worked out in the fields with the farmers? Have you ever trekked across the Andes with a mule and each of you carrying a hundred pounds on your back? Hemingway glorified hard labor and put a shotgun in his mouth now, didn’t he? You want hard labor go out and join the repentants up in the mountains who don’t believe in sewage or electricity.”

They returned Belano with silence and downcast eyes.

“You’re being too lazy. What’s the purpose of any human endeavor? To put death off as far as you can. Poverty and stress and physical labor: what things bring death closer? Death is never further off than when you’re famous! The South Americans have got the thing figured out. They understand there is no cause but the self. Look at Borges, Neruda, Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa. All louts, all men with no causes but the vague sentiments of their memories. All famous men, too. All capitalist whores and apologizers, too. All men who would betray ideals for a few more houses and women. And who wouldn’t? What else would you write for? To get rich or to fuck. Do you get laid from your writing, boy?”

There was an energy about Belano, hedonistic and nihilistic, that infected those around him.

“No, I don’t.”

“Are you a faggot?”

“No.”

“Then why isn’t your writing getting you any pussy? If it‘s not getting you money, pussy‘s the only other payment that makes it worthwhile.”

The girls laughed and Xavi took more from the flask. It was low quality liquor, insipid and cheap.

“Why do you write, Arturo?” the equine girl asked. So he was fucking her, or trying to fuck her; Xavi would have chosen the ghoulish one, if forced.

“Why beauty, of course. And immortality. And to fuck. And immortality again. But to fuck especially.”

They all laughed and drank and then Belano produced yet another flask and for a long while he riffed on Paz, recycling some of the famous poet’s ideas about death and sex. Later Xavi went out into the hall with the ghoulish girl while the equine girl stayed behind. Belano closed the door and winked at Xavi; he imagined her prodigious teeth raking the scales off a snake. He and the ghoulish girl took the stairs down, and as she went in front of him she walked backwards, holding herself on the railings like a gymnast on parallel bars. She swung herself back and forth like a ghastly pendulum. Must have some Callisthenic background, Xavi thought. Lit a cigarette and taunted him with her distance. For a few flights he thought she might take him back to her dorm, or that he might take her home but then they emerged drunkenly into the lobby and a janitor was cleaning the floors, and all they did was walk silently into a hot, dry night and the girl quickened her pace. Xavi trailed off. He called Octavia.

“I’m sorry about the other night.”
   
“Why?”
   
“I was so awkward and quiet.”
   
She laughed mawkishly. “Where are you?”
   
“I’m near the University.”
   
“Meet me at the Amulet. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
   
He had coffee and tried to sober up. During the day the Amulet was a bookish café where students went to read or write, but after dark it turned into a bar where men could meet other men, or where they could meet transsexuals. Electronic music pulsated behind the counter. Xavi watched women arrive graffiti-ed with makeup, women with broad shoulders and conspicuously thick ankles and Adam’s apples concealed beneath scarves or handkerchiefs. Octavia called when she was outside. She drove an ancient Toyota, beaten and pocked, rusted at its fringes. It rollicked and rucked as she drove amidst rush hour traffic. They crawled north, around Centro Commercial, caught in the onslaught of semis and windowless vans and dusted pickups hauling their cargoes, legal and illicit, towards the border. A hundred different kinds of music pounded outwards into the streets. The lights of cafes and taquerias were bleating alive, their counters filling with girls dolled up for the evening, with cops, with malandros wearing jewelry and knock off sunglasses and defective Rolexes. The sidewalks bloated with whores and with mothers herding their children.
   
They drove northeast, through thinning, hemophiliac traffic. These were the middle class suburbs, Las Rosas Que Caen, Invierno del Hibisco, Tierras Altas del Rio. The adipose layers around San Rafael‘s heart. In Las Rosas Que Caen the houses were built back from the street, and some were gated; those that weren’t were segregated by parapets of Wax Myrtle and Purple Sage, stray bundles of creosote that had drifted in when the neighborhood still bordered desert and the French or Spanish merchants wanted to escape the bustle and heat of the mercantile city. Xavi could see balconies and moon windows, wrought iron, silhouettes moving to-and-fro: the ghosts of other lives with their minor daily dramas, their anonymous fears and triumphs and humiliations, whole lifetimes lived as shadows in a window. Still quite drunk, he thought about the improbability of personal history. Or, he thought about the near impossibility of two personal histories running concurrently and then colliding.
   
“Turn left,” he said abruptly.
   
They’d crossed into Invierno del Hibisco. The houses were simple and mostly identical, set closer to the street. They had small dusty yards. Some of the yards had been converted into gardens, and some of these gardens were verdant and lush while others were unruly, squalid with death. Some of the yards were littered with toys, bicycles and soccer balls and baseball bats. A few had chintzy statues of Guadalupe, or saints. Many of the houses were decorated with window boxes of blossoming Clara Curtis Chrysanthemums, Red Spider Lilies, asters and marigolds. Xavi remembered this, the smell of anise.
   
“Turn right,” he said, “and make the next left.”
   
Occasionally the border fence came into view, a shabby barricade of crenellated tin or aluminum, crowned inconsistently by barbed wire. The evening’s shadows were long and sinuous with autumn. Octavia turned off the radio and whenever they rolled to a stop the fecund sounds of domestic tranquility came in from the street. Children shrieking, and televisions, and the vibrancy of a kitchen preparing dinner. Behind them, lurking like a phantasm above the city, was the vestigial glow of the maquiladoras, forever burning.
   
“Stop.”
   
Octavia stopped. They were in the middle of a block of identical homes. A few kids playing football milked the day’s lingering light. Xavi pointed to a house across the street, small like all the others and with a low concrete wall surrounding the backyard.
Wild grasses were encroaching upon a stone garden and a shrine to the Virgin. Aster grew unbridled out of its boxes and around the frames of darkened windows. An old bicycle napped in the tall grass of the front yard.
   
“Your house?”
   
He nodded.
   
“Not anymore, of course,” he said. “Can I smoke in here?”
   
“Let’s get out.”
   
They stepped outside. The road was poorly paved, dusted with loose gravel that crunched beneath their shoes. Octavia stretched like a languid, lean cat, reaching very high into the sky. That sky was a tapestry of multihued stratus clouds. Xavi lit a cigarette and kicked at the gravel; he’d always loved the sound of stone under foot, the grind of it. The kids down the street were shirtless and their ball, which was worn down to just the pulp, the hard raveled fibers of the core, escaped from them and skittered down the street. Octavia galloped lazily towards the ball and instead of kicking it back to the boys, like Xavi expected, she dribbled away from him and into their midst. She talked to them, and they to her, but whatever they said was obscured by distance and by a wind coming down from the mountains. He watched her for a time, kicking the ball back and forth with the boys, learning the formal regulations of their game, moving fluidly between them, twice their size, a natural, full of grace. He leaned against her car smoking and debated joining them but felt that somehow it would be a grave intrusion, an interruption into something intimate that he didn’t understand. Then he looked to the sky, which seemed vitreous and two dimensional.
   
She came back two cigarettes later, stippled with sweat, the underside of her chest darkened. The boys watched her go and then waved and then watched for a while longer, perhaps stirred by some numinous prurience, a force beyond their comprehension. He remembered discovering masturbation, at the age of seven or eight or nine. Sitting in bed with his half sister, bouncing himself on his belly. How she would lie beside him and bounce, too, frustrated that she couldn’t achieve the same viscous purge, rubbing her hands and fingers in it. He wondered if she remembered any of this. He wondered why he remembered it and wished he hadn’t. Octavia smiled, color in her cheeks. She separated her tank top from her skin, pulled it away and let in the air, fanning herself in exaggerated parabolas.
   
“Why’d you drive out here?” Xavi asked.
   
She shrugged. “I like driving when I get bored.”
   
“How’d you get the car?”
   
She shrugged again and smiled deviously.
   
“It doesn’t bother you driving in the city alone?”
   
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”
   
They drove due south. On the horizon was a flock of birds and bats, their wings going like pistons, their little bodies indistinguishable as they darted and dove from the night. The houses lost their symmetry. The orderly diction of the suburbs fell into the indecipherable vernacular/profanity of poverty. Ramshackle homes built close together and constructed from spare metal sheeting and old garage doors and tattered pieces of plastic. Fires burned incessantly, the street pinched and was encroached upon by habitations. All space was public. The stench of El Pantano, the city’s largest illegal dump, hung wetly in the air, an almost visible miasma of garbage and refuse. Many of the maquiladoras hired private drivers at majorly discounted rates and these drivers, many of them just boys, many of them associated with the Sonoran cartel or with El Hermandad, trucked the maqui waste to dumps like El Pantano, or El Valle, in the city’s southeast, or Palacio del Fuego, in the north.
   
She stopped the car where a group of boys were standing watch over the road like medieval sentries. They were probably seven or eight. They were selling drinks from an oil drum. She bought two beers from them, and asked them for a good place to eat. They gave her directions. The beers were cold and beaded with moisture, and Octavia held hers in her lap while she drove. Calle Monte Vista was the first major artery they encountered, and instead of taking it east, downhill, back into the city’s cauldron, she turned west into the foothills. Etiolated shacks and shanties were terraced into the hillsides, a pastiche of material and color: tin and aluminum and faded wood and plastic; rust and blanched blue and dun and a thousand shades of brown. She turned south onto an unmarked road that had been beveled from the slope. Above them homes bled like an oil spill or coagulated blood into pockets and plateaus on the mountainside. Higher still were the penitents, the imposing, stochastic walls of their compound built from stone and wood and glass and metal, a crazy façade, bespeaking madness.
   
“What do you think they do up there?” she asked.
   
“Talk to God. Pray for us. Beat themselves silly.”
   
“I hear they have orgies, like enormous, epic orgies. In costumes and skulls and full regalia. Orgies that last for days, sometimes weeks. They take peyote and mushrooms and other shit, I hear.”
   
“I doubt that.”
   
“It’s what I hear.”
   
“Just rumors, to discredit them”
   
“They’re batshit.”
   
“They just think the world’s beyond redemption and irrevocably fucked.”
   
“No, they think that if they flog themselves and wail and pray that God will come back in some rapture and save them.”
   
“Save us,” he corrected. The bottom of his beer was warm, vile.
   
The road ahead of them burned with the florescence of commerce. Stalls and carts occupied both sides of the road, and thick crowds of people moved without any sense of order. The sibilance of a hundred conversations, the polysyllables of competing stereos. Cars were parked in the middle of the road, double parked in places. She parked and they walked until they found the place the boys had recommend. They bought two more beers. The city below them reminded Xavi of the wings of a moth in repose, stunned by some great and catastrophic light. The schisms of shadow and light were patterns that resembled eyes and mouths but were really just a system of camouflage, a means of outwitting predators. Any sense of logic or reason was externally imposed. The distant streets palpitated and pulsed with cars. The city‘s center was like a dilated heart, spilling platelets to its outer extremities. On the peripheries, the maquiladoras blazed, a conflagration that heightened the nothingness of the vast desert to the south and east.
   

The café had a U-shaped bar, open to the street. At the bottom of the U there was a buffet of congealed bean dishes and chili dishes and pork dishes. There were empanadas and chimichangas, too. Flies were everywhere. She ordered something he didn’t recognize, some combination, and he ordered three empanadas and some tequila and they stood in the amorphous crowd waiting for their food, bodies pressing against them, brushing past them, and it occurred to Xavi that cities were very much like bodies, bodies constructed by human gods, imperfect, especially Mexican cities, striving maybe towards perfection or more likely ruin. Was there a perfect form? Cities lived despite their imperfections, and they were difficult to kill but it was possible, he supposed. And if cities were like bodies, then so, too, were countries, and of course the whole planet was very much a body, and the universe, too. He imagined the whole universe as an increasingly complex system of nesting dolls. He was drunk again, thinking ridiculously. He wished he could go home and write, or that he could take Octavia home and find the courage to fuck her.
   
They sat at the bar next to two off duty police officers and watched the crowd. The city had, for as long as it existed, been perched in perpetual limbo between two civilizations: one modern and global, one parochial and hermetic. It suffered the vagaries of a port city: the industrial mayhem, the corporate meddling, the all-encompassing haze of manufacturing. Populated by young men from nowhere and headed anywhere. Men who were proficient only at waiting, their empty days punctuated by cigarettes and the girls who walked the streets in their masks of blush and mascara. The girls with their pubescent tits pushed together like unripe oranges. The somber girls with impenetrable eyes that could look through walls and across oceans, girls who could feel neither pleasure or sorrow, girls whose entire lives were negation. Nearly a quarter of the city’s residents were undocumented and in transit. San Rafael was a city for dreamers and vagabonds, for those looking to disappear, for those with nothing to lose, for those trapped by miserable circumstance. It was the great terminal of Mesoamerica. A city looming in the shadow of the insatiable empire to the north but tethered to the tribes of the south.
   
But the faces here seemed serene, not distorted by longing and striving.
   
Xavi listened to the two cops, who were drinking beer at a prodigious rate.
   
“Did you hear about what happened in Guerrero?” one asked the other.
   
The other shook his head, stuffing an empanada into his mouth and washing it down with half a beer.
   
“Well I got a cousin down there. A good kid, a young kid. A little raw, but a good kid with good instincts, the kind of kid you’d want to take under your wing.”
   
“Uh huh.”
   
“Well you know how it is. A guy he doesn’t know approaches him one day at a bar, slides him some money. Says, hey, the Boar’s got some people coming through here next week, gonna be staying out at the old Mendez farm. So my cousin, eager kid, goes out and tells his boss and they check out the old Mendez farm and, would you believe it, they find a whole party of malandros out there, bundles of smack, a plane even, a motherfucking private plane. But the worst part, you must have heard about it.”
   
Again the other cop shook his head.
   
“Do you go out of your way to not know anything about the world? Is it a choice you make, to be such a dumb fuck faggot? Or were you just born that way, born helpless? My cousin, my little cousin, good fucking kid, finds these big old vats of acid, these oil drums of acid and with a little detective work, good old fashioned policing, they figure out that these sick motherfuckers have been dropping people into these vats of acid. Live people. Kids, women. Making whole families watch while one by one they’re liquefied in this acid. My little cousin discovers this, an envelope of money in his pocket, from God knows who.”
   
“Huh.”
   
“Vats of acid. Kids. Whole families.” The cop shakes his head and downs a shot of tequila and chases it with a beer. “Does it seem to you like the world is getting worse maybe? Like everything is just going to complete shit?”
   
“It was always shit.”
   
“But not like this. The Sonorans were always tough chingados. Hard bastards, certainly not the kind of guys you’d want to cross. But that was the point, compadre. If you didn’t cross them, you didn’t have yourself a problem. They run their shit, we let ‘em be, we co-exist. What do they call that?”
   
“Symbiotic.”
   
“Yeah, that. A win-win relationship. Or, at least not a lose-lose relationship. Maybe we were losing, right, but not losing, right? Now who the fuck knows. You go out the door in the morning and you don’t know if you’re going to walk back in that night. You don’t know if some chingado is going to pick you up and cut off your balls and force feed them to you and then drop you inch by inch into a tub of acid. For no reason at all other than to send some message, that this motherfucker is a bad one, the motherfucker of all motherfuckers. For no fucking reason at all.”
   
After eating Xavi and Octavia walked out from the small oasis of lights into the empty night. They followed the road for a while until it bent around the hill’s southern flank. A fierce wind met them. The blackness below was broken only by intermittent fires and the floodlights of heavy machinery.
   
“Santa Teresa,” he said.
   
The cemetery, mostly invisible now, covered the length of a long, arid plateau.
   
Octavia shivered.
   
“Come on,” she said, but he didn’t move.
   
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
   
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous. How could I, in this world?”
   
He turned to face her; they’d been moving parallel for most of the night: as passengers in the car, or while walking through the crowds. He couldn’t remember directly looking her in the eyes all night.
   
“Come on,” she said. “I’m tired,” and she started walking back towards the car, towards the neon florescence of the cafes and stalls, towards the communion of appetites.

~

That next week an envelope arrived from Armando, the editor of the Journal for a Free and Peaceful Mexican Republic. Inside was a check for 450 pesos, and a letter.

Xavier,

Thank you for submitting. I liked this. It’s haunting, and succinct. It poses a question without presuming to know the answer. This is good writing. For future submissions, consider adding a few more specifics. Instead of broadly representing the residents, one or two distinct voices lend credibility and resonance. Also: loosen up a bit. You seem like you’re trying to write what you think ‘journalism’ is supposed to be. We’re not very formal here. Let loose, be yourself.
   
Also, do you have an email address? If not, that’s ok; feel free to continue submitting hard manuscripts. But if you do have an email address, submitting articles that way makes my life just a little bit easier. My email is Armando@journalFPMR.com. I look forward to working with you in the future, Xavier.
   
All my best, Armando Rojas

~

A week later Octavia came by again. He was beginning to worry she’d forgotten about him. She kicked off her shoes and sat on the edge of his mattress while he sat shirtless at his desk. She told him about the time she wrote a perfect poem. She said it was like the lines came from outside her body, from a god or something very much like a god, something more benevolent than God. It was like working in a trance, as if the entire history of the world was flowing through her and helping her to write the sixteen lines that comprised the poem.
   
“I spend all my hours trying to find that feeling again,” she said.
   
He showed her the letter from Armando. She smiled matronly. He couldn’t pinpoint her sentiment towards him. There were times she seemed like a mother bird protecting him with her wings. He didn’t care for that.
   
“So you’re no longer one of us then,” she said.
   
“What do you mean?”
   
“A poet, kid. You’re no longer one of us,” she smiled teasingly. “Good, good. I’m glad. You won’t waste half your life in fantasies and inventions and elaborate labyrinths in which you forget what is tangible and what is a creation of your loneliness. You won’t fall into the same awful voids that we fall into. Voids from which the only ladder is a clear and true sentence. Except I don’t even know what such a thing looks like! So where do we find it, kid? Where do us poor poets find that ladder? Externally. I visit the old masters, the men I loathe because I cannot be one of them. But only the weak find salvation in the external, and almost all of us are weak. So soon I fall back into the void, and I am in constant need of new, purer provender. You’re smart to give up on it, to reside on solid ground.”
   
“I’m still a poet,” he said, shyly, uncertain if she was serious or sarcastic, affectionate or bitter.
   
“I think you should keep writing for him. You could write very good non-fiction. You have a heart for universal sentiment and an eye that locates very small details most poets can’t be bothered with. You like specifics, not metaphor. You like strong images instead of devices. That’s important. Because what remains after we read something? Do you remember character or style or structure? What we remember are images, and nothing more. That’s the key to endurance: to create images that survive and metastasize, that will haunt the reader long after he’s left your world behind. I‘m proud of you, kid.”
   
“I’m still a poet.”
   
She looked at him with her extraordinary dark eyes, like volcanic rock, and refused to look away. That night, after she left, he sat at his desk and tried to write a poem. A poem about Octavia or about the city or about the summer or about anything. He thought about Tomas out in the world, anywhere in the world, writing feverishly and meeting women and living on the streets and cheating death and staying up until dawn, watching the sun come up over new cities or vistas. He tried to envision Tomas in Paris, but he’d never been to Paris. He tried to envision Tomas in Istanbul, but he’d never been there, either. He tried to envision Tomas on the plains of Mongolia, in the swelter of Mexico City, climbing the cliffs of Bhutan. He’d never been anywhere. What the fuck could he possibly write a poem about.

~

Christmas came and went with its bells and its fanfare, its feasts, but mostly its corruption. The city swaddled itself in gifts. Xavi thought a lot about his half sister, who was his only surviving relative. She was somewhere in the States; he didn’t know where. He went onto the roof of his building and smoked cigarettes and pissed down onto the street. Late in the night a procession passed by. They carried a likeness of the newborn Christ. Women sang, men played drums. All of the marchers were older, and some of them could barely walk. They moved slowly, banded together by elbows and hands, carrying each other forward and down Calle Cortazar toward Maria of the Sepulcher, built by Jesuit merchants in 1864. The Christ they held aloft was the European Christ, fair haired and fair skinned.

~

After the new year he went with Octavia to Galilee, the used bookstore. It was located in the Good Neighbors Industrial Park, which wasted away like the core of a rotten fruit at the heart of sprawling Colonia Caida de Rocas, one of the northwest’s oldest and poorest suburbs. The park had been built during the city’s first maquiladora boom, in the late ‘60’s. The land, back then, had been mostly desert. Its openness and its proximity to the border seemed attractive. But with the influx of new jobs, neighborhoods spread out from the industrial park like wild fire, quickly occupying any desirable real estate. During the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, the maquiladora boom shifted to the city’s southern and eastern borders. The former tenants of the Good Neighbors Industrial Park upgraded to newer, state of the art factories, leaving the surrounding neighborhoods to languish. Many of the houses were bought up by slumlords and became drug dens or way-stations for coyotes shuttling migrants across the border. Many of the homes were abandoned, their windows boarded up, or vacantly gaping, like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. The yards had grown wild. Bodies were discovered amongst the barren lots with alarming frequency, many of them decomposed long past the point of identification. The city police referred to the area as the ‘the wasteland,’ not without a hint of resigned affection. The area was often used as a proving ground for new recruits; those that could survive a year walking the beat in the wasteland had a real future in the department.
   
Galilee occupied one of the storage barns at the center of the Good Neighbors Industrial park. The parking lot was nearly empty. Unruly tufts of wild grass sprouted from the broken pavement like the last hairs on an enormous balding man’s pate. Inside, the bookstore’s long latitudinal lighting fixtures resembled gymnasium lights. They hummed and throbbed, but many of them had burned out and not been replaced. Large sections of the store were lit by camping lanterns or candles. The candles were reserved for the most obscure sections, like sci-fi or pornography.
   
Meliquades, the owner, sat behind a judiciously messy desk just inside the front door. It was cluttered with tools and books and papers. He was bearded like a wild man, nearly blind, and medieval in the way of a ghostly saint from a Brueghel painting. He was the sole arbiter of this, his cavernous paradise.
   
“Octavia,” he said after lifting his nose like a blood hound. “Dearest Octavia, mi amour.” His milky eyes floated like dead fish in his sockets.
   
Octavia kissed him on both cheeks and presented her arm, which he took. She helped him to his feet and, slowly, the three of them moved into the old man’s cathedral of literature. The long corridors disappeared into deep shadows and emerged later in new light, thus shortening and elongating the perspectives of the place without logic. It made some of the corridors appear infinite; others seemed to vanish into an abyss; others still seemed to emerge from wormholes as new, parallel universes. The bookshelves were ramshackle and mismatched. Some of the shelves looked stolen from bedrooms, and others were oversized towers, like they’d once stored immense industrial machinery. Xavi wondered how anyone reached the apexes of the tallest shelves; the store’s ladders only climbed two-thirds of the way up the highest shelves.
   
Meliquades doddered at a processional pace. Rarely, they would pass someone perusing the shelves, callow souls of pale pigmentation whose sinister eyes seemed like smoldering embers. They struck Xavi as lost wanderers, condemned men. Where are we? he wondered. Octavia and the old man were conferring softly, in an intimate tone that Xavi didn’t care for.
   
“Meliquades,” Xavi said, “I don’t mean to interrupt, but how does a lone man like yourself operate a business of this size?” He found it hard to believe that in a city as ruthless as San Rafael the old man had never been robbed, or worse.
   
“Well I was once a young man,” he laughed at the obviousness of the statement, but also its preposterousness; it was difficult to imagine someone so decrepit as young and vital. “I started this project when I was a young man, and I was determined to collect every book that had ever been published in the Spanish language. A tall order, of course, and an impossible one. Not unlike writing itself, which is striving towards an impossible perfection. I had two brothers, then, men equally as passionate, or maybe more passionate, about literature than I was. And the three of us set about scouring the globe for books. Sometimes we went our separate ways, one of us bound for a village in the mountains of central China, another for a library on the edge of the Amazon, and the last for a collector’s house in Philadelphia. It would amaze you the places books end up, the routes they travel, the hands through which they pass. Sometimes I looked at a book, the names that had been scrawled inside its cover, the notes in its margins, and I yearned to know its journey,“ he said. “Sometimes me and my brothers traveled together, too.”
   
“Where did you get the money for all that traveling? Not to offend you, of course.”
   
Meliquades smiled. “There are means of traveling for free, in this world, if you are creative and insistent. There are many people passionate about literature, and the more we traveled, the more connections we made, the more we found people who were intrigued by our quest, the more we encountered people willing to help us find the most obscure, difficult texts. Sometimes, admittedly, we’ve had to use some techniques that might be described as dishonest. On rare occasions we’ve even had to descend to outright theft, a tactic that I’m not proud of, but that was, from time to time, absolutely necessary.”
   
“But what about now?”
   
“Yes, now I’m an old man. My travels are mostly behind me. And my brothers are dead. I’ve been resigned to the upkeep and maintenance of my business, which is, as you can see, endless. But as you can see, I’ve been able to find people willing to help, fellow book lovers. And, as I’m sure you know, there are ways, in this city, of protecting one’s self, if one is willing to pay the right people. Or the right peoples.”
   
Xavi suddenly realized that Octavia had wandered off. He was now alone with the old man.
   
Meliquades stopped.
   
“I hear that you are interested in Suarez.”
   
“I guess. Maybe. I have a friend who was very interested in Suarez.”
   
Meliquades smiled opaquely. “I have a book for you,” he said.
   
He climbed a precarious ladder, moving methodically, ascending rung by wobbly rung. He reached out, dangling precipitously from the ladder, barely connected to it at all. Xavi thought, more than once, that the old man was going to fall. Such a fall would almost certainly have killed him; he was nearly twenty feet up. Finally the old man reached the book he wanted and, very slowly, began the process of descending the ladder.
   
“Here,” he said, back on solid ground, out of breath. “Suarez’s first novel.”
   
The book was a hardcover, blank, in decent condition. The pages were only slightly yellowed at their edges. There was no water damage or fading or smudging.
   
“How much?” Xavi asked.
   
“Please,” the old man said. “It’s a gift. Now let’s go find Octavia.”

~

Two nights later, Xavi began reading Suarez’s first novel:

I loved a girl once, and it now seems an acciaccatura before the shitstorm that followed, though at the time I didn’t know better and I thought a new light had entered my life, and it would never burn out. She was a young thing, eight years my junior, and with an activist’s verve and spirit. It’s not an interesting story: I loved her and she kept me mostly at bay, visited me only in the late lonely hours when her heart grew haunted with fear and with ghosts. I never fucked her or saw her naked, I never even kissed her. But she took my hand once, and I can’t forget it. We were driving out into the country away from the systematic madness of Buenos Aires, the checkpoints hadn’t yet been established and the curfew hadn’t yet been instituted, so we drove out into the country, feeling free, free as sea birds. It was one of those adamantine spring days, so hard and fresh, and the trees were shedding their pollen in exaggerated snowy shivers. Her hand was out the window cresting the wind, redirecting it, and then with her other hand she reached over and very casually, like it was no big deal to her, took my hand. It was her left hand and there was a ring on the middle finger that her grandmother had given her, a ring of hammered silver from somewhere in the campo. She liked to twirl it and play with it while she talked. So I held her hand a while and she cocked her head my way, a dreamy look to her eyes like she was somewhere else or like she was watching this unfold from above. Then it got dark and we drove back into Buenos Aires, down the brocaded avenues and the cafes whispering of revolution and sabotage. I thought maybe this was an epiphany, something I’d read so much about, and that in the weeks to follow this trickle of affection would become a cataract.
   
Instead within two months she was among the disappeared and I was in the jungle with a gun in my hands, and the screams and pleas of tortured men reverberating the decrepit houses of my dreams. I do not know whether that girl was among the real loves or the fake loves of my life, though both ultimately amount to the same thing, which is a kind of descent, like a plane fighting against free fall. But because she cannot or will not age, and because I never discovered the true nature of our love, she endures as a pure thing, like spring water uncorrupted by development or deforestation or the influence of humanity at all.

The novel was one hundred and seventy-two pages long, and Xavi read it in one sitting, smoking an entire pack of cigarettes in the process.

~

Four days later, as if he could sense this shift in Xavi’s reading habits, a postcard arrived, with no return address. The handwriting was messy and hurried, as if it had been written at gun point or while the post office was about to close for the weekend. The postage was from Ecuador. Inside there was only a poem. It began:
   
Night descends on Quito like a rusted hammer.
The last tendrils of sun evaporate as dreams into morning.
The city slums exsanguinate into the mountains,
spilling over the earth’s wimpled clamber like an invasive weed.

It went on like that for fifteen lines, enough to fill the post card, before it petered out without conclusion.
   
That night Octavia visited. She was, by then, so comfortable at Xavi’s apartment that, when arriving, she knocked once, perfunctorily, to give Xavi just enough warning to put his dick away or to put his book down, before letting herself in. Instead of sitting down, like she usually did, she paced anxiously, stepping over the clothes and the books, not saying a word. She was frazzled in a way he hadn’t seen her before. Xavi sat on his bed re-reading Suarez. He decided not to show her the post card.
   
“Do you think I’m a good writer, kid?” Octavia finally asked.
   
“Sure. You’re very good.” Xavi was used to the insecurities of writers. He was, after all, at least marginally a writer, and he was wracked by the doubts and fears that came along with putting words on a page: fear of wasting one’s time, fear of exaggerating one’s talent, fear of being bad, fear of searching in the entirely wrong place for meaning, fear of being a laughingstock, fear of being redundant, fear of being unoriginal.
   
It was, however, unusual for Octavia to exhibit such fears, or, really, to discuss her writing at all. She liked to perform, and to read, but she treated any accolades or criticisms with an almost lunar detachment. Most writers took things so personally because they viewed their writing as an extension of their identity. It was like the writing wasn’t personal to Octavia, like it was just something that happened, no different than sleeping or eating or pissing.
   
“You’re sure?” she asked.
   
“Of course.”
   
“Ok, well not just good, but good enough.”
   
“Good enough for what?” Xavi asked.
   
“Come on, kid, that’s easy. Good enough to matter. Good enough to endure. Good enough to write something that will be read in places far and wide, and for decades after I’m dead.”
   
“I don’t know,” Xavi said. “Maybe. But I don’t really know. How can you know?”
   
Octavia sat down on the floor, leaning back against the wall across from Xavi. A heap of dirty clothes and of half-read books was between them.
   
“But what if I’m not? What’s the point of going forward with it if the odds that I’m not good enough are far better than the odds that I am? What’s the risk of giving up now? Of going back to school and working for the government? Or of crossing the border. Or of finding a rich man and marrying him and becoming a mother. The risk of continuing, knowing that the odds are against me, is that I’ll waste my life.”
   
Xavi thought about this for a while but couldn‘t come up with a response. Octavia kicked off her shoes, and the bottoms of her small feet were black with soot and earth.
   
“Why are you so worried all of a sudden? I’ve never seen you worry about writing.”
   
She shrugged and let out a tired sigh. “I can’t write. I haven’t been able to write for a long time.”
   
“Me either, if it counts.”
   
“Yeah, but for me, it’s this titanic struggle. I sit down every night and try to force myself, absolutely force myself to write. And then I wonder why I’m doing it if this pain is so powerful, if the struggle is so great that it torments me.”
   
She smiled very sadly at him.
   
That night, after Octavia fell asleep on his floor, using a dirty t-shirt as a pillow and a sweatshirt as a blanket, he typed out another article for Armando. It was about Galilee and Meliquades and the city’s abandoned maquiladoras and how at least some of them were being transformed by ambitious artists and musicians into real spaces, spaces where people could go without fear. He titled it, unoriginally, “From the Corporate Ashes.”

~

While he waited for a reply to his article, Xavi worked his way through Suarez’s oeuvre. His first novel was a slender, compact book, and it felt wonderful in Xavi’s hands, the kind of book you liked to carry everywhere, that you liked to open and close at random just to feel its figure in your hands. The protagonist was an Argentine pilot during Los Deseparacidos. He flew by the cover of night, transporting bodies, either those of the murdered insurgents or those of the militia. The bodies began talking to him, arguing between themselves, making the case for or against the regime. The protagonist’s co-pilot was blithely unaware of the voices. At first the pilot thought they were dreams, then he thought he was losing his mind, then he began to view the voices of the dead as his only true, honest friends in the world. He could talk with them about things he’d never been able to discuss with anyone else.
   
Suarez’s second novel, which the critics considered to be his weakest, but which Xavi found extremely moving, was a love letter to the author’s father, who had been a government biologist tasked with determining the number of chromosomes in the human genome. It was slow, meticulous, and thankless work. On the verge of a historical discovery, his father had been upstaged by another team of scientists, who concluded their research a few months sooner. The day Xavi finished reading it, two letters arrived in the mail. The first was from Armando:

Xavier,
   
Of course I remember you; the story about the voices in the silver mines. This is a drastically different piece, but I like it just as much, and maybe more. It’s authentic and precise, there’s nothing overly ambitious about it. I mean that in a complimentary sense, like you aren’t trying to say more than you know. You’re not bullshitting me. Which is good, because there’s already enough bullshit in journalism, and in poetry, and in the news, too. Then again, maybe I’m just biased. Galilee is in my neck of the woods. It’s one of my favorite haunts. Or at least it was, when I used to get out more. Never get married, Xavier. It’s hell on your nerves, and on your literature. You should come out and see me, and we can go to Galilee together.
   
I’m sure you’ll have noted the lack of a check this time. For that, I am sorry. Our funds are a little bit tight this month. Life as a small newspaper in this country is pretty tenuous. We scrape by, but sometimes we’re operating in the red. Actually, we’re always operating in the red. Now we’re operating in the deep red. But we’ll come out of it. And when we do, I promise there will be a check in the mail and headed your way. I hope you won’t take offense to this, and I do hope you’ll continue to send things my way. We always need good writers.
   
Armando.

The second was another postcard, this one from Buenos Aires:

Whenever I am faced with a difficult labor, or whenever I fail
in the face of difficult labor, I find myself inevitably thinking
about the Jews on their forced marches, runs, through the
ruins and desolation of Europe at the end of the war. Would
I have possibly had the strength to endure those runs? Would
I have had the fortitude necessary for survival? Or, and this
I think when I have already failed in the face of much lesser
hardships: would I have rolled onto my side at road’s edge
and waited for the cold, or the starvation, or the bullet?

Xavi did not know it yet, but it was a quote from Suarez’s fifth novel, about a government agent tracking a group of neo-Nazis in contemporary Austria.

That night Xavi tried to write poems. He hadn’t written a good poem in nearly three months. He still thought of himself as a poet, but he was beginning to have doubts. In the oneiric/hypnagogic moments right before sleep and then again in the mornings coming out of sleep he wrote poems, abstract poems that were in a language he was so close to understanding but couldn’t, not quite. They were poems that floated in some primordial ether, sentences that were perfectly clear for half a second and then gibberish the next.
   
He wrote two poems. One was about a 17th century monk living ascetically in a cave in the woods outside of Philadelphia. He wrote it thinking about Tomas. He wondered what such isolation did to the spirit. Living with only stone and water and earth. In the poem it was raining. Inside the cave the monk was working by candlelight trying to complete a new translation of a text he discovered in the depths of the Mexican desert. What was he doing in the Mexican desert? What was he doing in a cave outside of Philadelphia in the 17th century? The text was long and erudite and the monk didn’t speak Spanish very well, but he had a few dictionaries and a few books of grammar, and he would study and translate, study and translate. Because it was perpetually dark in the cave - it was a very deep cave, daylight had to meander through multiple labyrinthine passages of Pennsylvania limestone to reach the monk, and by the time it finally did it was no more than a whisper, a whisper so faint that he could only decipher it if he spent a very long time studying it - he could work for fifty or sixty hours straight without his circadian rhythm being thrown off kilter, or without feeling the urge to eat or go to sleep. Slowly the text was coming together but the monk knew his life was also being slowly extinguished. He could never finish before he died; the meaning of the text, which seemed to be a history of a forgotten people, would never become clear. And what was worse, the translation he’d constructed was stilted and often nonsensical, due to his rudimentary understanding of the language. He tried in vain to finish, but soon it became clear to him that he would die before finishing. So the monk walked out of his cave, walked out of the woods, and took a carriage into Philadelphia where he spent his last years drinking ale and frequenting the brothels until he died of consumption and no one knew who he was - the residents of the city, which was very small back then, only recognized him as the perverse drunk who occasionally spoke in Spanish - and he was buried with the victims of that year’s cholera epidemic and the slaves who had died from the unusually hot summer. His unfinished translation slowly wilted and moldered in the depths of the cave.
   
The second poem was a conversation between a man and his son as they rode horses through the desert.
   
Neither poem was very good. The evening seemed a total waste. Xavi regretted writing. Not writing was an awful fate, a sickness that slowly liquefied his internal organs, but writing badly was somehow even worse. It was like being that monk in the cave and realizing his life was going to come to nothing. Around midnight Xavi gave up and went out to take a walk. First he walked along Calle Cortazar, and stopped in at a gas station to buy a pack of cigarettes. He kept walking the familiar streets of Pajaro de los Cantos, but the streets seemed forlorn and narrow and impossibly sad. Somehow he actually felt worse than when he had been writing poorly. He thought that if he had a gun he’d probably end his own life, the world seemed so hopeless, but then he reminded himself that this was a stupid thought because, of course, he didn’t have a gun, and it was easy to think, “If only…” He had plenty of buses, which he could step in front of. He had plenty of buildings tall enough to jump from. He had plenty of alcohol, plenty of pharmacies from which to buy sleeping pills. But no, he thought, it had to be a gun. That was the only thing quick enough to avoid that kernel of regret that all suicide survivors talked about. The first moment your feet leave the ledge and you’re airborne and it suddenly occurs to you how minor a problem poverty is, how minor a problem the end of a relationship is, how minor every problem is when juxtaposed against death, which was, of course, the only real problem. Well, fuck, he thought. So while sucking down his third cigarette he hailed a cab and told him to drive him as far west as forty pesos would get him.
   
He felt better almost immediately, lulled by the motion.
   
“Can I smoke in here?” he asked.
   
“Sure.”
   
He offered the driver a cigarette and the driver accepted. They drove west out of Pajaro de los Cantos into Centro Commercial and its cornucopia of squat office buildings, and chintzy stores selling cheap cell phones, knock-off electronics, stolen or refurbished computers, and American fast food restaurants, their menus developed and specifically tailored to the local populace by white men working in board rooms in places like Bridgeport, Connecticut, or New York, New York, or Moline, Illinois. The driver got a call on his cell phone and he argued with someone that, Xavi presumed, he was sleeping with or in love with.
   
“You’re ripping my heart out, you bitch, you fucking bitch! Don’t you see that I love you? What the fuck are you, are you fucking blind? You’re ripping my heart out, you cunt, you’re ripping it out and biting into it right in front of my face,” he screamed into the phone.
   
While the driver argued, they descended the central plateau out of Centro Commercial. Soon they were in the Cuenca de la Luna, a stagnant wasteland of burnt out and boarded up ranch style homes. South la Cuenca were all the auto malls, and their stadium lights glowed distantly as two dozen football games were being played concurrently. They burned through the night above pastiches of Fords and Hondas and Toyotas. La Cuenca was lit only sparingly. The driver pulled over.
   
“That’s your time,” he said.
   
Xavi paid and got out and he continued to walk west. The streets had a submerged quality to them, as if Xavi were in a neighborhood that was under water. The night was very still. The occasional street light seemed very far off. The houses were like wrecked ships or skiffs that had run aground on hidden shoals. He’d never walked these streets before. He thought about how much of the city he didn’t know, how many streets and neighborhoods were completely foreign to him. He smoked a cigarette and collected his thoughts. Maybe he wasn’t a writer after all. Maybe he’d only been playing the role, trying the clothes on for size. Maybe he didn’t possess the discipline or the talent or the passion. Maybe he was about to devote his life to something that he wasn’t any good at and people would lie to him, and protect him, and tell him he was good when behind his back they would laugh at him and pity him and feel sorry for him for wasting his life on a fruitless pursuit. This wouldn’t be a shock, actually; if he considered the odds, it was the most likely outcome. Most artists lacked real talent or real discipline and wasted their lives in obscurity and died in obscurity and were utterly forgotten. Maybe he’d be better off giving poetry up now. Maybe he’d be better off going back to school and getting a degree in business and becoming rich and fucking a lot of beautiful women and spending money recklessly and lavishly. He would still die in obscurity, of course. But if obscurity was the only guaranteed destination, why not enjoy the ride?
   
He came upon an unnamed bar that burst brightly like a supernova in an otherwise barren galaxy. Sitting outside were Felipe Munoz and Alejandro Cueto. They were sitting at one of four plastic table, smoking and laughing and drinking large plastic cups of tequila. The other plastic tables were empty and dirty and windswept. Xavi glanced through the door of the bar and the interior looked as wasted and abandoned as the exterior. A bartender absently watched television, and music played softly. A few men played pool at two ramshackle pool tables. Xavi thought they were acquaintances of Munoz’s and Cueto’s, which would likely make them acquaintances of his, but he couldn’t tell.
   
“Xavi,” Cueto said, lighting up a fresh cigarette.
   
“Hey, Alejandro, Lipe.”
   
Munoz nodded, rubbing his hands against the cold.
   
“Awfully sad part of town to be walking alone in,” Cueto said.
   
Xavi shrugged. He motioned towards the pool tables with his chin. “Awfully sad place to be drinking.”
   
Cueto laughed and passed Xavi the cigarette. “Lipe keeps bitching about the cold. Columbians aren’t built for this weather.” Munoz dragged his cigarette and smiled glumly.
   
“What are you doing out here?” Munoz asked.
   
“Just walking.”
   
“Why don’t you join us? We’re not doing much, but neither are you, by the looks of it. Why not get drunk if you can’t sleep, right?”
   
Xavi went inside with them. The bar was, in fact, empty except for Diego Flores and Francisco Ramos. The two of them were nearing the end of a pool game that Flores was winning, handily. Flores glided and stalked around the edge of the table while Ramos incessantly chalked his cue in the corner, scowling defiantly.
   
“Come on, you faggot. End it. Quit prancing like a cocksucker.”
   
Flores smiled to himself. He was a painter. Most of his work was indecipherable: spattered and isolated genitalia, helixes of light and spirals of shadow. His latest painting was a piece scaffolding erected in the figure of an incredibly buxom woman; the space at the scaffolding’s heart was empty. Xavi actually liked it quite a lot, a complex, nuanced structure built around nothing but empty space. Flores also worked the morning shift at the Chrysler maquiladora a few miles away. He worked an assembly line that made break pads. He didn’t sleep much, or ever. He sported an unseemly, cadaverous pallor and he mechanically plunged cigarettes into his mouth, one then another. He calmly sank the eight ball. Ramos let his cue fall to the ground and spurned Flores’ conciliatory handshake.
   
Ramos stormed off to the bar. He was stocky and porcine. His face was badly scarred and pocked from horrible adolescent acne. There were whispers that he was a low level pusher for the El Hermandad. Of course, San Rafael was rife with rumors. Xavi put little faith in them. It wasn’t difficult to connect anyone to one of the cartels.
   
Ramos returned with a pitcher of beer and a glass for Xavi. He tossed him a cue.
   
“Want to play?”
   
“Sure.”
   
“Any good?”
   
“No.”
   
Xavi poured himself a beer while Flores racked.
   
“We’ll play doubles,” Ramos said. “That faggot with the Columbian.” He gestured towards Flores and Munoz. “Loser buys the next pitcher.” Xavi wasn’t happy about being paired with Ramos; he preferred to be teammates with someone he liked.
   
“I can sit out a game, if you want,” he said to Cueto, but Cueto shrugged him off and set to work rolling a joint. Above them a ceiling fan circled lazily. A few of the empty tables at the front of the room still had glasses and napkins on them. The bartender relaxed with his elbows on the bar. He watched a silent television that showed a soccer match between San Rafael and Morelia. Sergio Gomez crooned on the stereo. On the bartender’s sinewy bicep was a tattoo of an eagle carrying two snakes in its talons.
   
Flores broke and didn’t sink anything. Ramos nodded to Xavi and Xavi sunk the one ball in a middle pocket, then made a difficult cross table shot to sink the seven.
   
“Not any good, huh?” Flores said, sipping his beer. Xavi, bent over his cue, smiled up at the painter. He didn’t make a shot the rest of the game, but after two misses, Ramos got hot and made every ball but the eight, which he knocked in on his second try. While Flores got two more pitchers of beer, Munoz racked. Xavi and Ramos finished their beers and conferred in the corner.
   
“Pull your elbow in a bit,” Ramos said.
   
“Huh?”
   
“Hold your cue like you’re about to take a shot.”
   
Xavi crouched over the table, cue perched. Ramos tucked his right elbow in.
   
“Like that. Keep your elbow close to your body. Your shot will be more consistent.”

Cueto stepped in for Flores the painter. Ramos broke and sank two stripes. Cueto, who was probably the best player of the bunch, went on a four shot streak. Xavi made two balls, Munoz the Columbian missed, Ramos made two balls, and then Cueto went on another run and had a relatively simple shot at the eight into the far corner pocket to win.
   
“Shots for everyone says you miss,” Ramos the pig said while Cueto was bent over the cue ball.
   
“Whoa,” Munoz said. Ramos scowled malignantly. Cueto seemed unperturbed, nodded in agreement, and then missed badly. Ramos cackled and smacked Xavi hard between the shoulder blades.
   
“Come on, kid. Elbow in.”
   
Xavi made three balls. He had a difficult look at the eight: he’d have to kiss it at a sharp angle and slide it into one of the middle pockets.
   
“Hold on,” Ramos said. He jogged to the bar and reached over and grabbed a bottle of tequila. He poured Xavi a shot.
   
“Double or nothing,” Cueto said.
   
“Absolutely,” Ramos said. He poured Xavi another shot, and one for himself. “Elbow in. You got this. Bury these cocksuckers.” Xavi carefully lined up the shot, and he kissed it home. Ramos slammed the table in delight. Munoz and Cueto muttered to one another and pulled money from their pockets. “Two shots all around. Get Diego in on this, too.”
   
Flores was absently sketching something on a napkin.
   
Cueto went to the bar and paid for the bottle and came back with five shot glasses. They each downed one, and then at Ramos’ urging, quickly downed another.
   
“Motherfucker,” Munoz the Columbian muttered.
   
Ramos simpered and strutted. “How was that bitch the other night, Lipe? That one I sent your way.”
   
The Columbian wavered his hand like a seesaw.
   
“Oh come on, Lipe. That girl’s tighter than a newborn. Especially with your little dick.”
   
“She was too quiet. Too workman-like, you know? Like she was doing her chores. I like a girl who enjoys being fucked.”
   
“Maybe she’d enjoy being fucked by a real dick.”
   
“Ask Cueto about quiet girls,” Flores the painter chimed in, a flame suddenly lit in his eyes. He was Ramos’ antipode: tall and lean, androgynous and very close to beautiful. His face was small and unassuming, his chin and nose so slight as to barely be there. His eyes were a deep, almost purple, garnet. 
   
Xavi looked from man to man inquiringly. “What?” he asked. “What?”
   
“Cueto’s fucking a nun,” Flores said gleefully.
   
“No,” Xavi said. “Nooo.”
   
Cueto smiled mischievously and swallowed his tequila and racked the table.
   
“No.”
   
Cueto shrugged. “She’s a film buff.”
   
Xavi, who was beginning to feel drunk, laughed and slammed the table. The other men shook their heads the way one might at a remarkably gorgeous woman: disbelief that such things existed in this world.
   
“How does that even work, by the way?” Munoz asked.
   
“It’s pretty simple, really, Lipe. I put my cock inside her cunt. Sometimes her ass, if it’s her period.”
   
The boys rolled with laughter.
   
“You fuckhead, I meant how in the hell does it happen that a nun has the time and privacy to fuck you.”
   
“I mean, they’re not slaves. They have free time. They do community outreach.”
   
“Obviously.”
   
“Which convent?” Munoz asked. “Our Lady of the Mountains?”
   
“No,” Cueto said, swilling a warm beer that wasn’t his, grimacing. “Our Lady Guadalupe. On Avenido Juarez.”
   
“So what? You just stroll in off one of the busiest streets in town, in broad daylight, and deep dick this nun?”
   
Cueto shrugged. “More or less.”
   
“Incredible. Fucking incredible.”
   
“Xavi, what about you? You and the Poetess?”
   
“Really? You’re fucking Octavia?”
   
Xavi shrugged ambiguously.
   
“Really?”
   
Xavi broke into laughter. “No. God, no. I wish.”
   
The men shook their heads, mostly in unison.
   
“I don’t know if that girl’s ever been fucked,” Ramos said. “Lipe, you made a run at her.”
   
“She’s cold. She’s a cold, cold bitch,” Munoz said.
   
“And you, Cueto,” Ramos added.
   
“So did you,” Cueto retorted.
   
“I felt her tits at least. At the Amulet one night. Christ, that girl could use a good dicking. A real, hard fuck. That‘s what she needs.”
   
“All I could ever get out of her was coffee. I’d love to film her. God, I dream about filming her,” Cueto said.
   
“Don’t be a faggot.”
   
“What? What?”
   
“Just don’t be a faggot. That’s what.”
   
Xavi and Ramos won two more games. Xavi shot well. He’d entered that fine plateau of drunkenness where certain skills seemed to flow effortlessly and naturally, like clear water. He could envision shots before he took them. The invisible geometry of the table was almost tangible. It felt like moving inside something forbidden, like coming very close to some ineffable word, some secret. They took another round of shots after the fourth game, and this plunged Xavi into a clumsy drunkenness from which recovery was unimaginable. He didn’t make a single shot in the fifth game; he and Ramos lost badly. By this point Ramos was too drunk to care. His attention was divided between the game and a girl he kept calling. Xavi started taking shots for Ramos, not even bothering to line them up. At some point another group of men had come in and they were lingering at the bar. Xavi hadn’t noticed when they’d entered. Xavi went outside for a cigarette. He found Munoz standing in the middle of the road and staring at nothing.
   
“I shouldn’t have said that about Octavia,” Munoz said. “She’s not cold. She’s just got her own taste. I couldn’t understand her. It frustrated me. It still does. I don’t know why I said she was a cold bitch. Sometimes when I hang out with these guys I find myself saying things that I don’t want to say, things I don’t even mean. I don’t know how it happens.”
   
While Xavi and Munoz smoked, Ramos emerged with the group of men who’d been standing at the bar. He patted Xavi hard on the shoulder, and without a word, disappeared into the night.
   
“Where are they going?” Xavi asked.
   
Munoz half smiled. Before he could answer, Cueto and Flores stumbled out the door.
   
“You guys hungry?” Cueto asked.
   
They piled into Cueto’s pickup. Munoz and Xavi sat in the bed while Flores sat upfront with Cueto. They flew down Avenido Campesino past the mostly dark and empty homes. Away, to the south, the maquiladoras turned the horizon a simmering violet-white. The air smelled moist, faintly of sewage. Xavi and Munoz smoked and braced themselves against the fierce wind. Xavi looked at the muted stars and thought of the summer and of Tomas. He wondered where Tomas could be, if he was writing, if he was alive, if he was still in love with Octavia. It occurred to him, definitively, that he would never experience something like their summer together again. He would get older. Their friendship had been broken.
   
The pickup came to an abrupt stop. They were in the middle of an abandoned soccer field that sat on a small ridge. In the middle of the field was a small shack; its yellow lights glowed like a cold, minor sun. A few other cars and trucks were parked in the field. Couples sat on the back of truck beds eating tacos. Another group of boys kicked a soccer ball while they waited for their food. A three piece band serenaded the diners. They were a tuba, an accordion, and a guitar. The man playing the accordion sang, too. He was older, bald, with a saggy, beleaguered look to his narrow eyes. They sang a lively, meandering ballad about the Boar. Its title, as far as Xavi could tell, was “The Motherfucker of Motherfuckers.”
   
“It’s a shame,” Xavi said. “Some of them are such good musicians.”
   
“Besides. He’s a myth, a goddamned lie.”
   
“No, he’s not.”
   
“You’ve met him?”
   
“Seen him with my own eyes. I went to one of his feasts in my dreams. He welcomed with me whores and with a pig on a spit roasting over the bodies of his enemies.”
   
“You should be singing.”
   
“He’s real. Some things you just know, Lipe.”
   
“They’re just, songs, right?”
   
Xavi smiled. He listened to the musicians singing:
   
In the towns of Michoacan,    
the hands reach to the sky,
and the Boar reaches out,
his hands full and now their hearts are full.
   
While Calderon takes,
his fat little pig receives
the love and adulation
of those for whom he fights.
   
Spitting on the fuzz,
his goat’s horn in one hand,
bills in the other,
and la Malinche on his dick.

Munoz shook his head.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s good, that’s all. I like it.”

The two of them ordered a bag of a dozen tacos. Cueto and Flores were flirting with a couple of girls that might have been whores or might have been in high school. All of a sudden a wave of tiredness hit Xavi and he laid down in the truck bed to smoke. Munoz sat on the edge of the bed. Cueto and Flores strutted back towards the truck, a gaggle of young girls in tow. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen or sixteen. They were definitely in high school, and were possibly whores.

“Hey, what the fuck Alejandro?” Munoz shouted.

Cueto shrugged and grinned rakishly. “They wanted to go for a ride,” he said.
The girls climbed into the cab with Cueto and Flores. They drove around for a long while. The sweet odor of marijuana wafted out the windows. Xavi and Munoz sat uncomfortably in the truck bed, smoking cigarettes and looking at the blotted stars. The girls laughed inside the cab. The neighborhoods of their city streamed past them like a film watched in a dream. As dawn broke they were cruising somewhere along the city’s south, near Sangre del Toro. Inside the cab the laughter had stopped. All Xavi could hear was the wind. He sat up in the bed. Clouds had materialized. The sky was grey and monotone, and it spread a sickly, fallow light over the roofs of the slum. They were driving west, towards the mountains. Xavi watched the maquiladoras recede into the dreary dawn. The factories, bland and windowless, indistinct and imposing as gas chambers, seemed to extend infinitely towards the horizon. They ended somewhere, surely, but Xavi couldn’t see that point, that threshold beyond which they were no more. At the side of the road were long, ragged processions of workers. Some of them carried lunch boxes. Some of them smoked cigarettes. Their pant legs were dusty with desert. Xavi watched them, the faceless bodies trudging slowly into the expanding dawn.

~

A few nights later, Xavi read Octavia sections of Suarez’s fourth novel. There was a knock on the door. They looked at one another, befuddled, and Octavia answered the door. It was Alejandro Cueto. He stood in the doorway dumbly, holding a bottle of tequila.
   
“Come in,” Octavia said.
   
Cueto wandered the room as if he’d been the one invited, and they were all old acquaintances, rummaging through Xavi’s stacks of papers and books, reading snippets on a whim. Octavia seemed untroubled by any of it, sitting on the floor with her shoes off and her feet on the edge of Xavi’s mattress. She tapped the fingers of her right hand blithely on her stomach and occasionally Cueto would cast a glance her way. The two of them, Xavi and Cueto, might as well have not been there. Cueto picked up the Suarez books Xavi had been reading from. He’d stolen it the week before from Galilee. Cueto thumbed through it absently.
   
“Did you hear he’s writing a book about San Rafael?” Cueto asked.
   
“Who? Suarez?”
   
Cueto nodded and set the book down. It was a slender volume, like most of Suarez’s books, capable of fitting in the back pocket of a pair of jeans and being read on the bus or while drinking coffee. Xavi had plowed through the whole thing during a marathon session at Midnight Rooster‘s, a café near the University, down the street from the Amulet.
   
“What’s it about?”
   
Cueto shrugged. “I don’t know. Arturo was complaining about it in class the other day. Something about the fucking Argentines always thinking they can waltz into a place and talk knowledgably about it. You know how Arturo is with the whole Chilean - Argentine thing.”
   
“Have either of you read the poem Arturo wrote about crossing the Lago General Carrera with his grandfather as a boy?” Octavia asked.
   
The two men looked at one another curiously, suddenly suspicious, but also intrigued. Arturo was not someone to be trusted, at least when it came to personal conduct. He was a sybaritic demon.
   
“It was in one of his earlier books. Maybe his first, actually. It’s a long poem, of course. Formless and ragged on the edges.” She smiled to herself and leaned back exposing the slightly paler skin of her stomach and her hips bones that were like sharp Andean peaks. “It’s this very ominous, dreamy poem. About the old man with his horse blanket. About the horses prancing uneasily on the ferry, exhaling steam, their eyes wild and terrifying in the dark. About the old men making coffee on the deck and playing cards and about Arturo drifting in and out of sleep and watching the immense canvas of stars, both on the water and in the sky.” Another smile, this one more intimate. “Arturo’s so sweet in his early poems. I wonder what happened to him. Something must have happened to him.”
   
“He didn’t become famous,” Cueto said.
   
“His early poems weren’t trying to be famous. They were honest, internal. He wasn’t writing them for any reason other than because he absolutely had to write them. They have that quality. His later poems are trying to make him famous, and they’re bad because of it.”
   
“Well who gives a shit. Arturo’s an asshole.”
   
Octavia pursed her lips and said nothing.
   
Cueto stood and stared pensively out the small window. There was nothing out there to look at or study; it was a pretense of a window, allowing only callow light in and allowing nothing out. Cueto was acting, always. Every action of his reeked of premeditation, like he’d thought out every possible permutation an encounter could take and had decided upon the best response for each permutation. He seemed to live without spontaneity or surprise. He turned back to them, and Xavi had a vision of Cueto’s short, chubby, uncircumcised cock, which warranted more than a few close-ups in his films.
   
“I have a new movie opening next week,” he said. “We’re showing it out at Ramos’s place, his uncle’s old place in Tierra Salvaje. He has a projector there that still works, and a small theater. You should come,” he said in Octavia’s direction.
   
“What’s it about?” Octavia asked perfunctorily after a long pause. Sweat stippled the breast pocket of Cueto’s shirt. Cueto wrote and directed experimental films that were mostly just extraordinarily raunchy pornos with embarrassingly heavy handed religious imagery; his last had been about a young woman, dressed in white, fucking an, ostensibly, dead man for nearly three hours until he was resurrected.
   
“It’s about a very devout, Catholic girl who one night walks in on her father fucking this whore. She’s a virgin, the daughter…”
   
“Of course,” Octavia interjected.
   
“Well, yes. Yes, I guess. But she’s very devout, so it makes sense. And when she witnesses this, her father, you know, fucking this whore, it sets her off and she begins to rendezvous with some really unsavory characters. Beggars, lechers, sickly old men. But she refuses vaginal sex, because she wants to preserve her purity.”
   
“What character are you?” Xavi asked.
   
“The father. And also one of the beggars.”
   
“Whose the girl?”
   
Cueto shrugged. “Someone Arturo recommended.” He slumped down the wall to the feculent floor and lit a cigarette, looking benighted and hopeless. He traced a few concentric circles in the floor’s patina of dust. He ashed on the floor without second thought. “This place is filty, Xavi.”
   
“I know, I know.”
   
Octavia playfully raised her eye brows.
   
Cueto sneered in her direction and aggressively exhaled a plume of smoke. “When are you going to be in one of my movies Octavia? We’d work great together. The film would be brilliant. I’ve written a movie just for you. When are you going to let me film you?”
   
“Probably never, Alejandro.”
   
“Why?”
   
“Because your movies are too Mexican.”
   
Cueto laughed brusquely, one stunted ha.
   
“What the fuck does that mean?” he asked in Xavi’s direction, seeking help and not receiving it.
   
“They’re pure objectification. Hopeless objectification. They’re holding women up as some ideal and then reveling in their failure to meet that ideal. Or, they’re misconstruing the idea, subverting it with violence that’s supposed to somehow be edifying. It’s a common trap men fall into. You lavish the female form and then destroy it and lament the fact that you just can’t help yourselves from destroying it. How tough it is to be a man! That’s what all your work is about, Alejandro.” She looked at Xavi. “Yours, too, sometimes, when it isn’t good.”
   
“Me? No way. Don’t bring me down with him,” Xavi said, thrusting a finger Cueto’s way. Cueto smiled for the first time in a while, like a condemned man hearing that he wasn’t going to be executed alone.
   
Octavia almost laughed. She was enjoying herself. “Yes, you. And Arturo’s stuff, too. And Suarez’s. Fuck, I was wrong when I called your movies too Mexican, Alejandro. I’m sorry. They’re just too goddamned male. You spend half your movies worshipping the female form but she doesn’t even get to speak for herself. We never see things from her perspective. What it’s like to be penetrated so ruthlessly. What it’s like to be treated like a goddess. What it’s like to have your personality so attenuated. All you men obsessed with the female form.”
   
“I happen to have a great respect for women’s intellect, too. I like women. I like their bodies. So shoot me. I like trees, too, and nobody complains when I write about them,” Xavi said.
   
“You know who loves trees? Terrance Malick. And nobody gives him shit for filming trees in a sensual way,” Cueto added.
   
“Thank you.”
   
“It’s boring as hell when you write about trees. How many fucking ways can you explicate a tree? ‘It shimmered and danced in the wind and I pondered it‘s beauty, which reminded me of a woman I once loved, and I pondered how much older than me it was, and how it will outlive me, and what a remarkable universe that creates systems as complex and stoic as trees and as ephemeral as wind so that the trees can dance.’”  Both boys can’t help but laugh, Xavi feeling his face warm with blood. “There you go. That’s the gist of every poem ever about trees. And Alejandro, you don’t make movies about trees. I don’t even know where the fuck most of your movies are set. It’s just dark rooms and dark streets or dark coffins with these beautiful women dressed almost exclusively in white. This new one, this movie about the Catholic girl, how does it end?”
   
“You’ll have to see it to find out.”
   
“I’m not going to see it, Alejandro. I am absolutely, unequivocally not going to see your movie. So tell me how it ends. I can probably guess, but please, tell me.”
   
Alejandro looked plaintively to Xavi. “Are you going to see it?”
   
Xavi burst out laughing. “Probably not, no.”
   
“She loses her vaginal virginity to her father one Sunday morning after mass.”
   
Octavia is laughing so hard and so infectiously that even Cueto is laughing at himself.
   
“Let me guess: lots of bread and wine and blood.”
   
“Lots of wine,” Cueto said, beginning to embrace his own absurdity. “A shitload of wine.”
   
“You just can’t help yourself, Alejandro. How many close ups of your hideous cock?”
   
“Not that many.”
   
“How many?”
   
“Four or five. Probably five. Certainly no more than six.”
   
All three of them laughed for a very long time until they were all gasping for air and when they finally calmed down Cueto passed cigarettes around the room. They smoked, and occasionally one of them would shake their head and laugh an exhausted, strung out laugh.
   
“You guys don’t have the first idea about creating female characters,” Octavia said wistfully. She was on her back by then, sprawled angelically, which only added to the force of her argument. “You can’t help it, of course. You’re raised to be narcissists. You’re raised in a world, and in a city, that views women as replicable and replaceable and expendable. It’s beaten into you from such a young age. The church with it’s worship of the virgin. The way this country treats its mother figures. La Malinche, the Virgin of Guadalupe. I could go on, but it’s exhausting.”
   
A malaise had descended on all of them. Cueto watched while Xavi sat at his desk with his eyes closed. Octavia’s breathing shifted; it became bottomless and mechanical. The breath of sleep. It disconcerted Cueto. He got up to leave, his joints locked and stiff and sore. He walked out of the apartment, confused and strangely elated. Outside he found his face in the dark tinted window of a car on the street, a Nissan Moreno. He looked at himself and wondered, aloud, “What the fuck just happened?” Two prostitutes who happened to be walking by stopped and giggled, studying the short, pudgy boy with sympathy and confusion. “I don’t know. Maybe a drink would help?” the homelier of the two proffered, earnestly. She was short, too, with big watery eyes and small breasts that were situated very far apart so that her cleavage had a disjointed quality to it. She wore a gigantic, oxidizing necklace that resembled a dying sun. Her night was ending, and her friend was about to go home. She just wanted company, somebody equally perplexed by the human condition. Cueto, feeling disconnected and airy, accepted the offer. After the more attractive prostitute reached her apartment, Cueto took the homelier one to a bar where they drank three whiskeys apiece and talked about films, both Mexican and American, that they liked. The prostitute told Cueto a story about how one afternoon she went for a run (she ran diligently to keep her body in good shape) and on that run she came across an old man who was looking despairingly into the river. She thought he might jump, so she stopped and asked him if he needed help. He pointed into the river. There, amongst the trash and the rancid water, was a model plane. The old man had spent weeks building the plane, and he’d crashed it and was desperate to get it back. The prostitute, who was lightheaded from her run and thus feeling more generous than usual, said fuck it, what the hell. She described the feeling as an intense, almost religious, sense of unity with the old man. She took off her socks and shoes and waded into the disgusting, vile water. Mangled bottles and cans drifted like bumper boats against her shins. She retrieved the plane and returned it to the old man, who was so grateful that he almost cried. He forced a hundred pesos on her. She tried to object, knowing full well that eventually she would take the money. She objected out of obligation, because the situation demanded she object and he insist. Finally she took the money. She went home and showered, and when she got out her cell phone showed a missed call. It was a number she didn’t recognize, which wasn’t unusual; she was a whore, after all. Clients called all the time from strange numbers. She called the number back and it was a man. He sounded handsome, with a poised, baritone voice. She described it as velvety, soft. And he asked her who she was, why she was calling him. So the prostitute told him her name, first but not last, and explained that she had a missed call from him. After a pause, he said, Well My Name Is Carlos Gutierrez. I Didn’t Call You. Something Seems Fishy Here. And then he laughed this cute, self conscious laugh, and she imagined that somewhere in the world - wherever this mysterious Carlos Gutierrez might be - there must be a woman who had fallen deeply in love with his laugh, a woman whose dreams were haunted by this beautiful, sing-song laugh. But then he stopped laughing, and there was a long, pregnant pause. And really, what were two complete strangers going to talk about? She could tell him about her life, about the men she‘d loved and lost, she supposed, or about her job. Maybe he’d like to hear about the old man and his plane, and how she climbed into the vile river. She could leave out the part about the money, and he might think, Hey, this girl doesn’t seem so bad. Maybe, after hearing about the plane, he’d ask where she lived, and Hey, Maybe We Could Get Coffee Or Something Sometime? But that seemed pretty preposterous, right? Even considering how she suddenly felt pretty good about life and the universe and its strange and unforeseen turns of event. Instead, she laughed, too, and maybe he wanted to tell her about how his son was failing math and he was worried the boy’s life would amount to nothing and that he‘d be in his late twenties working two assfuck jobs and pining for an ex-girlfriend who was married to somebody else, or about how he always wanted to be a sculptor but it just never panned out, and he’d spent years regretting not working harder at it. Who knows, right? What happened is that she told Carlos Gutierrez good bye, and that she was sorry for bothering him, and that she hoped he had a nice evening. Good Bye, he said, And Have a Nice Life. Then he hung up. “Pretty funny, right?” the whore said, laughing, a little drunk from her three whiskeys. Her own voice was pretty, too, also velvety. It was probably her best quality, Cueto thought. After her story they talked about the absurdity of human interactions, how so many of them were one time things with people that you would never see again, and yet they would go on to have whole lives, full of lovers and heartbreak and loneliness, and then they would die.
   
When they parted she gave Cueto a kiss goodnight and wrote her number on their receipt. He promised to call but never did, which didn’t surprise the whore but depressed her nonetheless.

~

Two postcards arrived in the same week. The first was from La Paz, and it didn’t say anything on the back of it. The second was from Cusco. It was an old black and white photograph of Machu Pichu from the day it was ‘discovered,’ before it had been restored and rebuilt. Sprawling white ruins against black mountains. The writing on the back was so small and cramped as to be almost indecipherable.

It’s sad to see two great men so diminished. It’s sad
to see two great, promising men reduced to petty figure
heads of failed movements. It’s sad to say that Gabe is
going to die owning mansions all over Latin America
while he still supported Castro to the end. It’s sad to see
Mario locked up in his ivory tower American enclave
after he led the dying cause of right wing corporatism.
It’s sad that both men were such gifted writers, such gifted
men, and saw it fit to attach themselves to failed political
movements. Maybe that’s a symptom of their times, of course.
They came along at such a pivotal moment in world and
regional politics, at such a feverish time. Everyone was
a part of some movement or revolution. You were identified
by your politics, by your cause, by who you were aligning
yourself with. It was just how things were. Maybe there
was no alternative but for them to become pawns for failed
causes. But it’s still sad, now that they’re at the end, now
that we’re at the end.

~

The last Saturday in March, Xavi and Octavia went to the San Rafael Indian market. It was nestled in what had once been the city’s western frontier. It had long since been swallowed by new developments, and now seemed a strange anachronism, islanded, as it was, amongst an ocean of slums. The market had only opened for the year two weeks earlier. The tourists were not yet coming down in droves. They would swarm the place once the weather started to warm up. They would belch across the border on their tinted buses, from which they could ride through the city and look out at the slums and the chaos, safely hidden. But until they began to arrive the place would feel like a party that had been abandoned. There were stalls of jewelry made from turquoise and amber and silver. There were tables of hand woven baskets and blankets. There were bins of early season produce, mealy tomatoes and firm avocados. Octavia and Xavi walked down the pathways and alleys, tracing their fingers along crescents of silver, spheres of turquoise. They held aloft agave blankets with scenes from the conquest and scenes of indigenous myths and scenes from peyote dreams. They fondled pomegranates and tasted strawberries and smelled onions. The sparse crowd crawled sleepily around them, like a snake after a meal. Xavi bought Octavia a pair of earrings. They were shaped like quarter moons and made of amber.
   
“Since when do you have money, kid?” she asked.
   
He shrugged. “I’m still writing articles from time to time.”
   
She bought him a simple leather wallet.
   
“For your new found wealth,” she teased.
   
It was one of those indecisive early spring days. The weak sun would sometimes emerge like a convalescent patient, providing a superficial warmth before curling up behind a blanket of flat grey clouds. The thin light stole the color from things, made the day monochromatic. A wind coming from the north was brittle and cold. They bought two ceramic mugs of agave cider from a woman whose face resembled an eagle’s. A fire was burning somewhere nearby, likely at El Pantano, and when the wind blew, it was tinctured with garbage. The city’s illegal dumps housed communities of homeless and addicts. During the winter, it wasn’t uncommon for their fires to burn out of control and then to smoulder endlessly amongst the labyrinths of accumulated trash, sending spirals of acrid black smoke skyward like wispy minarets. Xavi bought a pouch of tobacco and some rolling papers. The two of them found a sad, forlorn little food court at the market’s northern edge, behind the stables and coops where the Indians kept their horses and cows.
The market was divided into halves: the newer south side and the older north side. The south side of the market had been raised and rebuilt during the mid-nineties as a part of the city’s efforts to increase tourism. Unfortunately, the construction was headed by the brother of the city’s planning commission. He was a royal fuckup who’d never been able to hold down a single job for more than a few years before racking up massive debt and burning every bridge his brother had built for him. But he got the job, still, because the city planner, in spite of everything, loved his brother unconditionally (their parents had died in unexpectedly when they were both boys), and still believed that he could make something of his life. The problems with the project were myriad, and immediate. First, every Indian vendor had to be paid for the time they would be displaced and, as such, would be unable to sell their crafts. Naturally, the government underpaid, or simply did not pay, a majority of the vendors; that, or the money was slowly pocketed as it moved its way through the pipeline from federal government to state government to city government to neighborhood officials. Secondly, many of the Indians had being paying dues to some of the more unsavory financial figures in the city - low level captains in the Sonora cartel, which controlled the city at the time without opposition, and was, as such, free to bicker internally over hierarchy - and these capos were, in turn, paying off members of the city police (who were notoriously underpaid and overworked). Sometimes they were also bribing the federal police, just in case the city police went soft. It was the unofficial stance of the Sonora cartel that it was better to have two dogs in a fight than one. Thus it was that the city planner - an ambitious and practical man of progressive politics who viewed NAFTA as an extraordinary opportunity for the city to become more than just a way station in the desert, but to become a very real member of the international community, an industrial heavyweight and tourist destination for antsy Americans seeking an authentic but easy immersion in a new culture - found himself spending almost all his time fielding angry calls from police chiefs and drug captains over their depleted income (which, the city planner reminded them, was really quite minor in the larger context of the city’s economy, and which would undoubtedly double, or even triple, after the market re-opened in its newer, more resplendent form). The Indians, who were getting the worst deal because they were being criminally underpaid and were still being squeezed by the esurient captains, banded together to form something of a union, and, on the day that the demolition was set to begin, this new union organized a massive sit-in. Over a hundred Indians set up camp and refused to leave. For two weeks the city government met with two merchants chosen to represent the new Indian union. They were older women, pacifists and mystics, who secretly harbored opposition to the project that went far deeper than money; they believed that a continuum between them and their ancestors was being broken, and that this new construction was nothing short of a desecration of a sacred place. They were both charismatic but soft spoken women, shrewd and intuitive, and they were very good at using the media to drum up support for their cause. Soon the opposition grew to include not just the displaced Indians but also many of the city’s migrants, students, women’s groups, and even much of the clergy, who saw an opportunity to demonstrate their benevolence and solidarity with the city’s massive, roiled underclass. A large march was organized in Sangre del Toro, and traffic along the San Rafael - Hermosilla highway, the main road connecting the slum to the maquis, was closed down. A group of priests led a march directly to the house of the city planner. That afternoon the two Indians spokeswomen were interviewed by a news station from Mexico City, and they came across as sympathetic and compelling. An even bigger protest, city wide, was scheduled for the next week. By then, many of the maqui owners were beginning to grumble - not just about the competence of the city planner, but about the competence of the mayor, a young, European-looking Mexican, and who was considered a rising star within the PAN. This conflict was stoked, undoubtedly, by the Sonoran state government, which was headed by a fierce PRI party loyalist, a career politician who had paid his dues and held his tongue even when lesser men were appointed ahead of him, a man whose national ambitions would inevitably be undone by a weakness for very young women but who was more than content to make life hell for the mayor and his city planner, whom he viewed as socialist atheist faggots (despite all evidence to the contrary), and a constant scourge on his great state, the worst hemorrhoids on the shitty asshole of San Rafael. He made sure to stuff any protests with low level PRI operatives, and to use his connections within the federal police and the Sonoran cartel (who were often the same people) to further squeeze merchants within the city, thus exacerbating the economic unrest and panic. The city planner, who was by then receiving death threats, desperately reached out to the state governor, hat in hand, so to speak, and the governor, before riding in on his white horse, so to speak, instructed his operatives to turn the massive, citywide protest into a chaotic rampage of looting that resulted in three deaths, hundreds of injuries, the destruction of seventy-three businesses or homes, and untold numbers of burned cars. This debacle turned public opinion decidedly against the Indians, migrants, women, students, and clergy, and allowed the governor to declare a state of emergency and send in his allotment of federal troops, who were quickly able to pacify what was left of the mob (which was made easier because most of the mob that was still rampaging happened to be cartel members who were friendly with the federal police). A day later the federal police marched on the hundred or so Indians who were still quietly, peacefully protesting at the old market. When one of the Indians - almost certainly a mole planted by the governor - charged at the police, they opened fire on the protestors, killing eight, including one of the two spokeswomen. The rest of the Indians quickly dispersed. The ensuing imbroglio, which cost the city planner his job, and would ultimately cost the mayor his next election, meant that the construction proceeded without any oversight - the media was too busy covering the political carnage at city hall - and the city planner’s brother, fearing that he might soon lose the contract, hurried to finish the job, cutting nearly every corner possible (and pocketing the profits of such corner cutting). The results were expectedly shitty. But despite that, perhaps because they had no other source of real income, when the market re-opened, almost all the Indian vendors returned, and those that didn’t were easily replaced. In the following decade, the market led a resurgence in tourism in the city, a fact that should have vindicated the city planner, but, ultimately, was of little solace to him.
   
Xavi and Octavia sat at a grimy plastic table, sipping their ciders. Xavi rolled a cigarette. Octavia put on her new earrings. Occasionally the sun gasped through the clouds, rushing across the ground in a fleet vein of pale light.
   
“Do you mind rolling me one of those?” Octavia asked. “I think I’d like one.”
   
So he rolled her a cigarette and they sat across from each other, smoking in silence, smelling hay and grain and the fecal warmth of the cows and horses. Xavi thought about his father, and how he would have died before ever riding out of the desert to sell trinkets to tourists. The wallet Octavia had bought him was uncomfortable in the pocket of his jeans.
   
“Do you know the one thing that I’m most afraid of?” Octavia said out of the blue.
   
“Being old? That‘s what you told me once.”
   
She smiled sardonically, as if to say, ha, ha. “Ok, aside from that.“
   
“Then no, I don’t.“
   
“Being trapped,” she said. She took a drag of her cigarette - it flared ephemerally in the wind - and then blew smoke in his direction.
   
“What do you mean trapped?”
   
“I mean…I mean I don’t want to feel my possibilities evaporating. To feel that I can’t get up and leave a place. To feel bound to a place or bound to circumstances. We’ve been hanging out for a while now. I’m still not sure what you’ve heard about me. But I disappear sometimes, without warning. I need to. It’s an urge that I have. It’s a need, really, it’s more than an urge. It’s a need that I can’t resist.”
   
“Why?”
   
“I don’t know. But when it rises up and consumes me, if I don’t leave, or, worse, if I can’t leave, it ruins me from the inside out. It dissolves my muscles and rattles my bones.”
   
“Where do you go?”
   
“Anywhere. It doesn’t matter where. It’s just that I can go.” She smiled sadly. “Women I know, girls I grew up with, are having babies. I think if I had a baby it would be the end of my life. I think I’d abort it, or I’d drown it, or I’d abandon it at an orphanage.”
   
She stubbed out the cigarette and pushed her hair back and smiled at him.
   
“My mom was a mystic, or so she said. She said she could see the future. She would go around to carnivals and horse races and markets like this, disappearing for weeks on end with strange men, or by herself. I mostly grew up with my grandparents, and my dad.”
   
“Are they still alive?”

She nodded. “They’re in Hermosilla.” She smiled at him, her arms still raised and tying up her hair. “Do you know how old I am, kid?”
   
“No. No, actually, I don’t.”
   
“Of course you don’t. No one does. You’ve never asked.”
   
Xavi smiled in embarrassment.
   
“I’m twenty-seven, kid.”
   
He didn’t say anything, but this didn’t seem to bother her.
   
“My father is a miserable guy. Mom finally left him for good, and now he’s living with his parents in the house he grew up in. He works as a mechanic sometimes. He used to drive trucks. But one night he got drunk and got in a crash and almost killed someone. So now he can’t drive. But he wasn’t a bad dad, at least back then. Now he’s tough to talk to, because he’s so miserable and narcissistic that he has no friends. So when I call he just rants and raves, for hours, telling me all kinds of things you shouldn’t tell your daughter, about whores, about my mom, things like that. In his mind he’s some hard working guy who has been screwed by bad luck and who has bad luck with women.” She shrugged. “So that’s my dad. My grandparents are dying. They’re very devout, and we don’t usually talk much. But we were very close when I was a girl, especially me and my grandmother. I learned to read and write because of her. I learned poetry because she was adamant that I go to school and do my homework. I think that if she’d been born fifty years later she could have been a great writer, even in this country, even with how we still treat our women. But she wasn’t. And she’s slowly lost her mind, and circled back to the church. Which happens, of course, when people lose their minds.” She smiled sadly and stubbed out her cigarette. “When I go home now, which is only once or twice a year, I always read my old journals, that I kept through my childhood. My grandmother has kept all of them, even though it isn’t a big house and they could use the storage space. It breaks my heart how passionate I was. How much I loved my family. How hopeful I was. And I don’t know why. Our lives were sad. But I was a kid. I didn’t know any better. I thought I was going to grow up to be an actress, or maybe a doctor.”
   
“There’s still time.”
   
She laughed, rested her head in her hand and looked at him, head cocked.
   
“What do you think about everything that’s happening?” she asked.
   
“What do you mean?”
   
“I mean what do you think about it. The violence, the stories we hear.”
   
He shrugged. “What am I supposed to think? It’s stupid. Kids killing kids for no reason at all. Fighting like dogs over scraps.”
   
She nodded. “Maybe.”
   
“What about you?”
   
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.”

~

Xavi had moved on to Suarez‘s sixth novel, which was ostensibly about a man who worked low level jobs at historic sites all over Europe. But really it was just a long rumination on art, and its subjectivity, and our fluid definitions of what constitutes art and what constitutes the mundane.

I had conned my way into a job as a security guard at the Vatican museum. I spent my night’s wandering amongst the stolen antiquities and treasures. I could spend eight hours studying just a few Roman busts, or the details on a valise, or the friezes on a funerary sarcophagus. I lost myself on these nights: in appreciation for the detailed beauty; wondering about the fluid nature of what constitutes art. In antiquity, was the mundane approached with a deeper seriousness, an incisiveness? Is what we now consider art merely functional back in the day? Did they have create art solely for aesthetic pleasure? Or did they just lavish the ordinary with an attention that we have lost?

~

In early April, Rafael Ortega’s band played a concert in an empty lot in Puerta de la Muerte. Rafael invited Xavi and Octavia. Xavi invited Felipe Munoz, too. It was a Thursday night. Winter was releasing the city from its grey vice. The days had regained the suppleness of spring.
   
Octavia drove the three of them. She parked and they climbed the road into Puerta de la Muerte, flanked by young kids smoking cigarettes and older men who walked emaciated horses by hand. The neighborhood sat on a plateau overlooking Santa Teresa cemetery. As home to immigrants working in the maquiladoras or those killing time waiting to cross the border, it was a mélange of Salvadorians and Hondurans, Guatemalans, Columbians, and Peruvians. Newcomers inevitably found their way home, so to speak. Guest houses and brothels accepted the wayward at all hours. Generators huffed and puffed while tangled clusters of electric wire crossed and re-crossed the street, spliced and diced, providing residents with inconsistent and illegal power. The streets were mostly unofficial, labile, unmapped. They were mostly unpaved. They began and ended without warning, like fitful dreams. They were palpitating, polyphonic alleyways, many of them running a few meters and then petering out into repositories of trash, or barren earth where a few scraps of cardboard served as beds for vagrants and vagabonds. Cement block speakeasies sold drinks from the south: guaro, pisco, aguadiente, chicha. Young men with tattoos wandered like stray dogs and the women watched them warily. Brothels operated openly; women as young as thirteen or fourteen sat sullenly outside, smoking joints, dressed-up like rag dolls. Illegal electronics were sold from truck beds. If one needed a car battery or a girl or an ounce of dope, a few minutes spent in the maze of Puerta de la Muerte would solve the problem.
   
It was Semana Santa, of course.
   
They walked through the Peruvian section. Old women with broad, indigenous noses and long, tattered dresses sat in the dirt and hawked idols or prayer beads. Men sold sweaters from the backs of wooden carts. White rose petals had been scattered down the side streets. Brass bands marched over the petals, bleating dirges. Great vats of chupe de viernas bubbled over open flames, spewing brine and flesh into the mealy night air. The storefronts were darkened, but small groceries gave away bread and wine, ladled out violet bowls of mazamorra morada. Men carried wooden crosses on their backs, or held aloft effigies of Christ, the Virgin, Peter and Paul. Women followed them bearing candles. Some of the side streets were completely dark but for these women, moving slowly, singing softly, their hands cupped and flickering. Processions of flame. Prepubescent girls in chatoyant gowns danced over the rose petals, twirling like dervishes. Bombastic boys watched from the corners, from the fronts of tavernas and brothels, smoking cigarettes, fingering their opulent, crass crucifixes, ears gleaming with diamonds. They barked at the girls, laughed amongst themselves, ducked into darkened doorways and openings when a customer ambled up, his offering crumpled in shaking hands. Little children sat in their mother’s laps, or sang wordless hymns, or danced with the older girls. Flowers kicked up in their wake, little bursts of white. Priests held forth on some of the unoccupied corners, offering confession, communion, the absolution of a year’s worth of sins.
   
Octavia led the two men, pushing them through the masses, smiling at the girls, bantering with the boys, kneeling and purveying the old women’s wares, letting them touch her face, take her hands, whisper a prayer. Occasionally a car would honk and sputter its way down the congested dirt roads, music bumping, windows tinted, headlights cascading over the colors, the fabrics, the wooden effigies so detailed that one could make out the wrinkles of St. Peter’s eyes. Illuminated the exalted faces for an ethereal second. The crowds would part and press outward, into the rabble of the shacks and cantinas. Octavia took Xavi unexpectedly by the hand and diverted him and Munoz into one of the bars. She ordered three piscos. She flirted with the bartender, asking him for directions. While she flirted, two girls approached Xavi and Munoz, who were grimacing and drinking down their pisco. They were stilted girls, unskilled and comely, uncertain of their bodies. One kept adjusting her cleavage. The other appeared to be holding back tears. They were dressed like old Vaudeville acts. Their faces were caked with dahlia lipstick and garnet blush. Munoz tried to slide them a few pesos, but the one with the fidgety cleavage raised her eye brows at the bartender and Munoz pocketed the money instead.
   
“Let’s get out of here,” Xavi whispered in Octavia’s ear.
   
The bartender had drawn a crude map on a napkin.
   
“They bring these girls up in the backs of trucks, like they’re livestock,” Munoz said once they were back out on the street, yelling into Xavi‘s ear to rise above the cacophony. “You’ll see them on the road sometimes. They go into these small villages and they promise these poor families to get their daughters into the States, to get them jobs. They say they’ll send back money and that the parents will live comfortably.”
   
“You’d think the parents would learn.”
   
“Some of them know, and do it anyway. Others just hope for the best.”
   
They followed the bartender’s map into the Guatemalan section. The sinuous main road, Avenida Ascension, was roped off. People clogged the side streets and the sidewalks. Alfombras, lush, lapidary carpets, were draped fastidiously down the middle of the Avenida. Older women hurriedly applied finishing touches to them. They were made of pine needles and sawdust, the dyes of fruit, the wilting petals of chrysanthemums and carnations and roses. They depicted scenes from the crucifixion but also pastoral scenes with turtles and jaguars, bicephalic serpents that hung in the branches of ceiba trees. Drums beat in the distance, the smell of incense heralding their coming. Men walked ahead of the main procession carrying tall poles equipped with hooks so that they could hold aloft the sagging bundles of wires. Behind them were children burning incense. Then came the cucurochos festooned in deep purple robes. They stoically held the andas, the elaborate floats depicting Christ on the cross, Christ the resurrected, the Virgin at the tomb. Behind each float was a generator, huffing and puffing, that powered the garlands of light that decorated the tableaus. Brass bands solemnly played funeral requiems. Men in Roman garb rode horses and recited, in Latin, Pilate’s proclamation of death. Women moved up and down the sidewalk, selling cheap crucifixes, bowls of corn meal, or puerile ears of charred maize. The bands bellowed over the generators, the entreaties of the desperate, the prayers of the saved. Latin garbled amongst a hundred dialects of Spanish and the slang of the malandros, who swam through the rivers of people like sleek simpering sharks.
   
Behind the procession the crowd contracted, spilling back into the street, marching behind the procession, singing or praying. Children sat wide-eyed on their father’s shoulders. After they passed, all that was left were the ruined, tattered alfambras, so meticulously constructed, so quickly demolished. Xavi knelt down and ran his hands through the sawdust and flowers, picked up a handful, crumbled it between his fingers. He thought, then, that the slum was a body without a heart, or maybe it was a body with a hundred invisible hearts, all beating and thrusting, reverberating into the indifferent night. Already women were sweeping away the refuse and laying down a fresh layer of pine needles, beginning the exhausting work of preparing for the next day’s march. The music and the voices receded down the plateau. Xavi imagined the procession moving into the Peruvian neighborhood, then the Hondurian, then the Salvadorian, the rituals merging, the faithful joining together and marching out of the slum and into the heart of the city, through the somnolent suburbs and the ponderous bureaucratic mansions, finally flooding into the maquiladoras, an endless cortege of bodies and voices swamping the factories, blaring their horns and beating their drums, closing down the assembly lines, disrupting production. What happened? they’d ask in the boardrooms in Beijing and Tokyo and New York. We don’t know. We’re being inundated by Mexicans. By Latin Americans. By singing and dancing. They’d scrunch up their faces, their flabby, bleached gringo faces, as if someone had unleashed an unimaginably awful fart. What the fuck? they’d think. What the fuck is going on? They’d pucker their assholes, text their mistresses on their Blackberries (circuit boards built in San Rafael, keypads in Longhua), double and then triple check their stock portfolios, frantically transfer funds to their accounts in the Caymans, drive home in their Lexuses (brake pads built in San Rafael, wheel axes in Taipei, headlights in Laos) to their submissive wives in their spotless manses (cleaned by Columbians or Guatemalans or Argentines), turn on their colossal televisions (cathodes constructed in San Rafael, deflection coils coiled in Zhangjiajie), smoke a cigar that was machine rolled in the Cigatam (subsidiary of Philip Morris) maquiladora on Calle Domingo Garcia Ramos, and try to ponder the colors and sounds, the texture, of their factories (which they’ve never visited, of course, though they’ve got top men - top men - who’ve assured them of the exemplary health and sanitation conditions) pulsing and sweating and vibrating with the songs of the resurrection.
   
Octavia and Munoz were standing about a hundred meters down the road, looking back at him, waiting.

~   

The concert was held on an empty lot that was surrounded on all four sides by high, uneven fences of corrugated metal. At one end of the lot was a stage. A band, not Rafael Ortega’s, played something loud and indecipherable. At the other end of the lot was a shoddy plywood bar behind which young boys were selling cans of beer directly from old oil drums. Munoz bought four beers, chugged one, and then he, Xavi, and Octavia each drank one. The lot was about half full, but more and more people seemed to be leaking in.    
They waded into the crowd, which was mostly Mexican, and mostly young. A lot of the men were shirtless, despite the night being cold. The temperature inside was at least ten degrees warmer than on the street. Xavi admired the profusion of tattoos, the eagles and snakes, the names scrawled in faded lettering, the memorials to cousins or brothers or friends. Closer to the stage some of the younger men had formed a circle, inside which they bounced rambunctiously off one another, throwing fists and kicks, bloodying each other.
   
They found Rafael Ortega leaning against a fence far from the stage. He was drinking a beer and smoking a joint. His band wouldn’t go on until one or two in the morning. 
   
“Xavi, Octavia,” he said smiling, kissing both of them on the cheek. Rafael was  a tall, affectionate man with long, greasy hair. He wore a white button down shirt that was stained beneath the arm pits and behind the collar. Only the bottom two buttons were buttoned. His face was long and lean. His eyes were small but deep. He was the kind of person with whom everyone was friendly but that no one had ever been alone with. Still, Xavi liked him immensely.
   
Rafael introduced them to his cousin, Hector, a chicano from Abolition, Texas, a few hours across the border, and Hector’s best friend, a white boy named Adam. Hector talked quickly, with the shifty bravado of a kid trying to prove that he was still a native, after all these years away. Adam was gigantic, quiet but imposing. He spoke very little, and his Spanish was muddled, but Xavi sensed that he understood more than he could speak. Xavi felt uneasy about both of them - the punk who wouldn’t shut up and the gringo who heard everything - and this made him uneasy and ominous about the whole night. A new band came out to play. The lot was filling up. The stench, of all the perfumes and the beer and the pot and the cigarettes and the sweat and just a hint of blood, was nauseating. Xavi and Munoz chugged two beers together. They smoked a joint with two girls from Arizona who had come down because they heard concerts in Puerta de la Muerte were an authentic experience not to be missed. Strobe lights pulsed over the convulsive crowd. People danced lasciviously against one another. Some of them were practically fucking.
   
“Isn’t this great?” one of the girls said to Xavi. She was short and blonde, wore a leather skirt that was too tight and too short. But she had sturdy legs that he liked.
   
“No, not really,” he said, and she looked at him for a moment, puzzled, before simply walking away. While he watched the soft backs of her legs, it struck him as remarkably sad that all these people were here, throwing their bodies together, desperate and lonely and mortal. Then he thought that maybe he was the one who was remarkably sad because he couldn’t allow himself to relax, to not worry about such things, to not analyze every situation from this strange remove where he was somehow superior because he didn’t allow himself to thoughtlessly grind and fuck and press himself against strangers, hoping they would press back. He chugged another beer. He found his friends.
   
“Xavi,” Rafael said, pulling him aside. “I want you to meet someone.”
   
“Ok,” his own voice sounded distorted by the music, the alcohol and pot.
   
Rafael introduced Xavi to his father, who had arrived, and looked more out of place, even, than the gringo Adam. He was a middle-aged man wearing khakis and a sport coat. He held a beer and stood by himself, looking like some sort of anthropologist. He was, of course, the poet from Mexico City. He’d been wildly successful as a young man, his verse marveled over for its vivacity and its vibrancy, but somewhere around the age of thirty-five he seemed to lose his energy and vitality, and his lines wilted. It was remarkable that that could happen to a writer, but it could. Images that were once clear could muddle. Rhythms that were once urgent could slacken. What caused a writer to lose his power? It came down to the question of what gave a writer his power in the first place (assuming, as Xavi did, that there existed such a thing as objectively forceful writing). A man could spend his lifetime studying theory, reading every book ever written, trying to find some equation for the perfect sentence or perfect verse, and then extrapolate those minor structures to create larger ones. And those structures could still feel false, mannered, inconsequential. There was no perfect theory of literature. There was luck and intuition. A writer was lost in a cave, groping for a way out. And the lucky few who found that way out were greeted by yet another labyrinth, this one more imposing and convoluted than the next.
   
“Would you hold this for me?” the Poet asked, handing Xavi his beer.
   
“Ok.”
   
The Poet reached into his coat pocket and produced a flask. He offered it to Xavi, who accepted. The two of them passed the flask back and forth in silence until it was empty. Xavi produced his cigarettes, and offered the Poet one. He accepted, and provided a light.
   
“I’ve read your poetry,” Xavi said.
   
“Ah,” the Poet said, staring away blithely at a group of young women. “Not the later stuff, though, I bet.”
   
“Well, not much of it, no.”
   
The Poet smiled tersely. “What’s the point, right?”
   
Xavi laughed.
   
“I’m not sure how the hell my son ended up in this city.”
   
“Have you heard his band before?”
   
“No, I haven’t. I live in Mexico City. There’s not much reason to come up north if you’re down there.”
   
The big gringo Adam approached Xavi, and in broken Spanish asked for a cigarette.
   
“Sure, here,” Xavi said, handing him a cigarette he’d dropped earlier in the night that was now crumpled and sagging. The Poet, again, provided a light. The three of them stood watching the group of young girls dancing. There were five of them, all wearing skirts varying in length from short to miniscule. Three of them wore precarious boots. The men watched in impressed silence.
   
“The women down here,” Adam finally muttered.
   
“Incredible,” the Poet said. “Get to them while they’re young though, boys.”
   
Then he nodded at Xavi and walked off.
   
Rafael Ortega’s band finally came on stage a few minutes shy of two in the morning. Their music was milder than the bands that had played before, more traditional. They combined long, laconic improvisations with the folk lyrics of traditional music: pastoral ballads, songs about unrequited love, lonely journeys through the desert. Rafael Ortega sang in his coarse voice, grumbling his way through the set. After one song he gripped the microphone.
   
“This is a song about a lost civilization, a civilization burned in the desert,” he growled. “We are that lost city. All of us, right here. We are from the atoms. We are the atomic bomb and the atomic bum. You know these weird things that I speak of. We all speak the same language, even if we’re separated by time and space, here, in the lost desert city.”
   
What the fuck is he talking about? Xavi wanted to ask somebody. But everyone else seemed to be digging it, they were nodding in unison, some of them held their drinks aloft. Octavia finally found him. He’d barely seen her all night. Seeing her beneath the strobe lights, under the influence, she looked like a different person, her eyes more rapacious, her face somehow more rigid. He thought, then, that we all carry secrets, secrets about loneliness, and they’re impossible to share with anyone. We might try, we might tell them about our loneliness, but the words always came out wrong, or maybe putting those secrets into words trivialized them beyond the point of truth. She was sweating and took him by the hand.
   
“Come on, kid.”
   
They danced slowly, not quite against one another. She’d stripped down to a white tank top that showed the slight paunch of her stomach, the dells of her hip. He put his thumbs on her hips, and pressed them into her, held her by the belt loops. She smiled at this, with her eyes closed, and curled her arms behind his neck. He was very drunk. He danced poorly, but she guided him as best she could, laughing at times, sweetly. At one point she took a finger and ran it over his forehead, down his cheek, along the crescent of his jaw.
   
After the concert they waited - Octavia, Xavi, Munoz, and the Poet -  for Rafael and his band. It was late and the slum was as quiet as it would be, meaning that the only sounds were coyotes somewhere in the desert, the gentle susurrus of voices conferring in kitchens, or bedrooms, the shouts of fighting lovers, the incoherent babbling of drunks. Xavi sat on a patch of broken ground, smoking. Octavia sat next to him, her head on his shoulder. Occasionally she would reach out and take the cigarette from between his fingers.
   
“Sometimes I disappear, you know,” she said.
   
“I know. You’ve told me.”
   
“Well I’m just reminding you. It’s nothing personal.”
   
“Ok,” he said. Then he did something funny and kissed her on the top of her head. He didn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t something he’d been planning on doing, or even something that he had a particular desire to do. But he kissed her, and she let out a slight but audible sigh. Life, he thought, is complicated and difficult, but often very beautiful.
   
Rafael and his band emerged. He embraced his father, and shook hands with everyone else.
   
“Hey, wow, thanks guys. Thank you. That’s the biggest show we’ve played. Pretty good, I think. Pretty good. Anyone hungry? I’m fucking starving. Let’s get some food. I’ll buy, everyone come along.”
   
They walked back through the labyrinth of mostly quiet streets. The remains of disintegrated alframbras were like multi-hued snow, and trash was everywhere. A few men scavenged through the trash, picking out discarded bones, or cans of beer. A few families were hard at work on the next day’s carpets, weaving and dying by lamplight or candle, talking softly amongst themselves, drinking coffee that steamed into the cold night. Near the bottom of the plateau a three-piece band was sitting outside a darkened cantina. They were older Guatemalans drinking bottles of beer that were scattered about a melting puddle of ice. They serenaded anyone who passed by, singing drunkenly. The group stopped and listened to the band. Rafael took out his guitar and soon his band was playing with the Guatemalans, and the Guatemalans were sharing the beer. Everyone sang, even the Poet. Octavia had her arm hooked through Xavi’s, and she sang sleepily into his shoulder while Munoz clapped his hands and laughed. The Guatemalans produced some dope, and Rafael rolled up two joints which were soon passed around. Everyone smoked, and sang.
   
“What time is it?” Octavia asked Xavi.
   
“I don’t know. It must be close to dawn.”
   
Xavi remembered, then, the year after his mother died, when he was 18 and his half-sister was 16, and one of their uncles, who spent most of his time at the brothel or bar, came to live with them. They were still in their mother’s house, in Invierno del Hibisco, but by then Tomas had moved further west, to a bungalow in Luz de la Montanas. Xavi spent most of his time sleeping on Tomas’ couch, reading, listening to the poets that came and went. When they went out to drink on weekends, his half sister would tag along, and they’d go to the bars dotting the mountainside where washed up bands, or bands that never were, would play, and where the lonely single women of the maquis would dance with strange men, men who were sometimes rapists or maybe worse, but the women were so lonely that they were willing to take that chance, just for a little human contact. Tomas and some of his poets would dance with the older women, pirouetting them, picking them up off the ground and spinning them in circles while the women shrieked in terror and glee. Xavi would watch, drinking cheap mescal with his half sister, and then they, too, would dance. They’d go from bar to bar, staying wherever was open latest, and then they’d walk home in the gloam of dawn, drinking warm beer and singing, or shouting, racing one another down the mountainside, riding on each other’s shoulders. Those were good nights. He missed them.
   
By the time they reached their cars the eastern sky smouldered a frail white. Xavi drove Octavia’s car while she curled up in the backseat and Munoz smoked cigarettes in the passenger seat. They rolled the windows down and turned on the heat. The car’s innards rattled and cranked, struggling.
   
“Octavia, dear,” Munoz said, “your car is a piece of shit.”
   
“Hm?”
   
“Nothing, dear. Nothing at all.”
   
The road back into the city was crowded with trucks bound for the maquiladoras. Xavi followed Rafael to an all night café in Colonia Jardins, which was south of Colonia Canto de los Pajaros, and was named because, during the brief French occupation of the city in the 1860’s, the neighborhood had been home to a series of beautiful, romantic gardens. Most of them had been filled with cement, or bulldozed and built over, or scavenged for building material; a few still remained, though they were meeting grounds for the mendicants, who roamed with their beards and their rags, and the penitents, who came out of the mountains to preach that the end of times was fast approaching.
   
They went to an all night café on Calle Algiers. There was a long, wooden bar that needed polish, and a series of large, irregularly shaped Formica tables. The lights were bright and modern. Rafael ordered beers and coffees for everyone, and a few plates of tortillas, eggs, beans and pork. He held court over the table, guzzling coffee like water, talking loquaciously about the need for a Mexican musical identity, about the need to connect to the heritage of musicians from not just the revolution, but from even before the revolution, the music that was played in basements and in caves, away from Spanish ears, the music that told the stories of generations.
   
“Music had a unifying purpose then, as it can now, right? That’s what we need to be doing, is telling those stories, stories about family, and about community, about perseverance and equality. That’s what those songs were about. They were creating a voice to subvert the established order. And now, we’ve got two established orders in this city, oppositional to one another, but really all a part of the same force. The maquiladoras, which keep us poor, and the cartels, which promise us riches. And what we need is a voice of protest against both the exploitation of the maquis and the false idols of the cartels. Look, this is history, man. Think about Javier Solis, think about all of us growing up listening to him on our parent’s record players. These are our forms. The ranchero, the stories of the frontier and the desert, small stories, because our lives are small, but small stories that connect us to one another.”
   
“What about corridos?” Munoz asked, stuffing a bulging tortilla into his mouth. Munoz and Rafael were doing most of the eating. “What about Valentin Elizalde, or Sergio Vega? Corridos are as much are part of our musical history as any form.”
   
“Yeah, sure, sure Lipe, absolutely corridos are, but times were different, right? Corridos were sung with a conscience back then, they weren’t about narcissism, or self aggrandizement, or debasement, right? They were about an oral tradition, about education. That’s how people in these villages stayed connected. A band would come through and sing their songs about what was going on in the world - slightly idealized songs, sure, performances no doubt - but still songs about the world, songs that connected one village to another. You could sit and listen to the music and imagine, somewhere far off, another person, just like you, listening to the same song. Think about La Carcel de Canenea. That’s a song about revolution, right? And about solidarity, man. Not national solidarity but class solidarity. It’s a song that was used to unite all these disparate villages and factions as one, oppressed voice, calling out for justice. The form that exists now, man, it’s just bastardized, it’s bullshit, it’s onanism.”
   
Munoz smiled and raised his glass.
   
The Poet touched his son’s arm. He’d been sitting back in his chair, drinking his beer, watching with a bemused smile on his face. “First,” he said, “we never listened to Javier Solis in our house. I don’t know where that memory comes from, but it’s invented, if you have it.” Everyone laughed, Rafael hardest of all. “Secondly, you have to remember that your great-grandfather dragged your great-grandmother with him out of the Amazon. And that your grandfather, born in Peru to Amazonian parents, married the daughter of a Nicaraguan fisherman…”
   
“No, no, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at!” Rafael protested. “These forms, these Mexican forms, are all just cobbled together, like a patchwork quilt, or a broken sidewalk. This idea of Mexican, as some Mexican identity, has always been something of a myth, right? Something imposed on us by the Spanish, the French, the fucking Americans.” Rafael uses his whole body to talk, ducking and weaving like a boxer or an addict, hands modulating like a professor’s. “I’m saying we’ve got to salvage the indigenous forms, and from them, from all these different forms, create our own musical identity, one that we create, one that tells stories we recognize in forms that we recognize. Lipe, the corrido, to come back to that, it’s been bastardized by gangster rap, which isn’t one of our forms. It’s a gringo form. It’s trying to take one of our forms and make it more like their’s. The cartel as a whole is some vehicle for this gringo idea of success. Or maybe it’s become a vehicle for that American idea, because it wasn’t always. Once it was about fighting the established order, once it was about pride, man, about subverting the forms. Now it’s just another corporate form. Now it’s just about the money and the jewelry, the cars, the clothes, the bling, all that hollow fucking shit that ain’t worth dying over.”
   
“So what’s the way out?” Munoz asked. “The way out is backwards, that’s what you’re saying. Regressive progress.”
   
“This is what happens. What was once conservative becomes progressive. The notion of a fractured but proud history, of these traditional art forms as subversive, that’s a novel idea now, especially in this city.”
   
“These are the same arguments we used to have about poetry,” the Poet said to Xavi in confidence. “One idea devours another, regurgitates it. And on, and on.”
   
Xavi smiled; Octavia had fallen asleep against his shoulder, somehow.
   
“He thinks music’s going to save him, and then the world. I’ll bet you think the same thing about writing. I remember feeling that. It’s still in me, buried beneath everything else, but it’s still there. I wish it weren’t. I don’t know what the way out is, or if there is one. I gave up trying to stop him long ago.”
   
They drank coffee until seven in the morning. Xavi drove Munoz home. Then, when he got back to his apartment, he woke Octavia up.
   
“Can I sleep at your place? I can’t drive,” she said.
   
“Sure.”
   
She came upstairs with him and he gave her his mattress. He tried to sleep on the floor, but his mind was whirring from the coffee, and whirring with thoughts of climbing into bed beside her, of taking her hand in his, of kissing her neck, of running a finger along her stomach. He didn’t know when he fell asleep, although by the time he did the room was full of light.
   
When he woke up, she was gone.

~

After the concert he and Octavia settled into something like a pattern. Octavia would show up, unannounced, two nights a week - usually Wednesday and Saturday but sometimes Tuesday and, more rarely, Sunday. She’d begun writing again, and at least once a week she would bring her notebook and stand in front of his small, pathetic window and read to him. Her voice when she read was somehow different from her conversational voice; it was an octave or two lower, and mostly monotone. He thought it made her seem less real, more like an actress. She never read sitting down, either, and never stood anywhere but directly in front of the window. He loved the days when she brought her notebook. He thought he would remember the sensation of watching her read, his gratitude and placidity, until the very end of his life. He told her this once, and she laughed it off. “Yes, until you’re ravaged by dementia. Then I’ll be the first thing you forget.” That night he wrote a poem, the first poem he’d written in over a month. It was about an old, demented man. Near the end of his life his first lover came to visit him, and she brought with her a book the old man had written for her. She read it to him, and he looked at her with the eyes of a stranger. Maybe Octavia’s right, Xavi thought. Maybe we forget everything if we live long enough.
   
He especially loved the way she would occasionally, very rarely, glance up at him from her notebook and smile impulsively, sheepishly, and would then make an embarrassed, lariating twirl with her hands. She only did this once or twice during every reading, and sometimes she wouldn’t do it at all. It seemed, to him, that the whole performance was leading up to that one moment, both of them anticipating it, delaying it. And when it didn’t happen it only made the pleasure that much deeper the next time.
   
“Poetry,” she once told him, “at least as far as I understand it, is about absence. What you leave out. What you put in and then what you take out. The reader feels that. Like something from a past life, almost.”
   
At some point during the spring he stopped masturbating to the thought of her. It wasn’t that his desire ceased; it persisted, just in a transfigured form. It was fuller than before, the way sunlight in late spring has a richness and density that it lacks in winter. It moved him somewhere that he couldn’t quite place. He thought, at times, that he would gladly to die to spend one hour in bed with her. But when he tried to picture her naked, or when they brushed into another, or when he caught her scent on his bed, he no longer got aroused; he wanted to cry. The beauty was so intense that the only proper response, apparently, was tears.
   
On the nights she didn’t read they would often go out to eat. She had a weakness for cheap Chinese food. She loved a place in the northern part of the city, off the Border Highway, along the blighted stretch of fast food restaurants and dicey motels and all night truck stops that welcomed travelers to the U.S. border. The restaurant was in the back of a motel that rented rooms by the hour and where Xavi imagined cum stained bed spreads and moldering bathrooms, shag carpeting that sagged in unexpected places, and paper thin walls through which you could hear your neighbors arguing and then, moments later, fucking. It was that kind of place. The dining room had once been a bar. There was still a dance floor, badly warped, in one corner of the room. The owner had installed a wall of tenebrous fish tanks in which eels and crabs and nameless, opalescent fish dumbly swam.
   
She liked to hold her hair up with the chop sticks, which he also loved.
   
Spring gave way to summer. Immense, gothic thunderheads rolled out of the west and crested the mountains, unleashing their bloated, black underbellies of lightning on the city.
   
Postcards continued to arrive at irregular intervals. Sometimes they came with poems scrawled on the back. Other times, they quoted Suarez. From Cuiba came the last paragraph of Suarez’s seventh novel, about a developer warring with indigenous tribes in the Amazon:

In the jungle you do not die. You do not even vanish.
In the great jungle you are subsumed, devoured, converted 
and dispersed so that you are in every vine and every frond.
Like the gnats you are everywhere. Vanished into the
abundance of the unmapped primordial world, a world
that stares out at us from the atlas, verdant and unified
and impenetrable, mocking our concepts of geography,
our systems of construction. A thousand thousand
Civilizations have been swallowed by this jungle. A
thousand thousand more wait their turn, ornate
palaces and splendid courtyards whirring amongst
the architecture of your mind. Waiting. You walk into
the jungle and build a city that never exists but as myth.

The day after receiving the postcard, Xavi returned to Galilee. He found Melquiades where he’d been before, at his desk that was messy like a saint’s desk in medieval paintings.
   
“Excuse me, I’m looking for a book.”
   
“Yes? This is probably a good place to start.”
   
“I’m looking for a novel by Suarez. His seventh. La Difunta Correa.”
   
Melquiades smiled, his turbid eyes lolling about. “Xavier. Octavia’s friend. The poet.”
   
Xavi smiled, too. “Yes. You remember that?”
   
“I remember a lot, even now, when I feel that I lose more every day than I learn. It’s a constant struggle for me, to take in more than I send out. To replace what is being perpetually lost. Although it’s strange, to continue building upon a foundation that is growing weaker and weaker, don’t you think?”
   
“I suppose there isn’t much of a choice.”
   
“No, I suppose not,” he smiled again. “Let’s find your book.”
   
The two of them descended into Melquiades’ labyrinth. For Xavi, the chiaroscuro of the long corridors was, if possible, even more disorienting than it had been the first time. They methodically wended their way through palimpsests and scrolls from the centuries before the Spaniards arrived. They walked past the fat, gilded, dusty Bibles of the occupation. They passed the sacred texts of a thousand different civilizations, those of the desert and the jungle and the sea, those of cities and those of agriculture, those of industry and literature. They passed young girls, their faces tear streaked, reading obscure French poets. Again, Xavi had to fight the sensation of entering a kind of hell, or netherworld. In his pocket, he felt for his cell phone. It was still there, and he pressed a few of the buttons, at random, reassuring himself of the tactility of the outside world.
   
“I have been hearing rumors,” Melquiades finally said. “Whispers and obfuscations.”
   
“About what?”
   
“About a lot of things. I suppose much of my life has been lived in the shadow of the world, has been shaped by rumors and myths and heresy. I hear rumors about your author, Suarez. That he has been working on a compendium of violence in this city, an encyclopedia of evil.”
   
Xavi didn’t respond.
   
“And then I hear about the evil itself. About its root structure, and its vice grip. That the roots, which extend out from our city, are slowly burning. And that the fire is rising up the continent, and will soon engulf us.”
   
“You mean the cartels?”
   
The old man smiled, but kept walking.
   
“I mean that there is a lot of evil in the world, and in this city. I believe that, I do. I’ve seen it firsthand, not just here, but everywhere. Callousness and exploitation. But maybe it’s home is here, in the desert, after all. Maybe the very heart of our city, whatever that heart might be, is evil, and the blood it pumps to its limbs and other organs is poisoned. Do you know how San Rafael began? As a battlefield between nomads, the site of a massacre. The Sumas had a settlement here, an impermanent one, and one winter night, the Mansos rode down the river and massacred them, raped their women, scalped their children. For centuries the Sumas and Mansos and Jumanos and Apaches fought over this crux in the river. And then came the Jesuits, with their slaves, and their mission to convert the indigenous. And you know what they really did, of course. They killed them with their pathogens, or with their guns. Or they enslaved them, in more ways than one. Economically, religiously. Battles have been fought here during the French occupation, during the war with our brother to the north, during the revolution against our colonial fathers. This is a city of fire and blood, it will never be anything different. And now, of course, we’re enslaved in a new way, to a different evil. The free market beast. And the black market it has spawned. This city is the cancer of that first market and the soul of the second. That is our fabric, our canvas. We are a way station between worlds, between salvation and desecration. What could survive that meeting, that collision, but for evil?”
   
They’d stopped walking. Melquiades motioned to a tall ladder. “Suarez is up there, near the top. Take whatever version you like best.” The old man smiled warmly. “It’s funny the kinds of books different people like. Some like long books with well spaced pages. Others like compact books with pages packed with words like sardines. When I was a younger man, and could read, I would try to read every edition of a book there was. The way a book was typeset could make me love a book or hate it; sometimes, I found myself loving one printing of a book and loathing another. What a strange paradox, right? We think of literature as so inveterate, but it’s hardly rooted to us at all. The books of your childhood or adolescence seem silly in your adulthood. It makes you wonder if there’s anything to us, anything solid, or whether we’re like those paintings from that strange Italian - what was his name? It seems to have escaped me. One of the things I’ve lost for today. I’m sure you know the artist, the man who created faces from pieces of fruit, or bodies from cuts of meat. Maybe all we are is cobbled together, parts of us slowly rotting.”
   
Xavi couldn’t remember the name of the artist either.
   
“Tell me something, Xavier, to replace the name of that artist I’ve lost. To maintain the equilibrium.”
   
Xavi thought for a long time about what to tell the old man.
   
“In Ixtepec, in Oaxaca, they found the bodies of forty migrants in the basement of an abandoned ranch. It’s happening all over down there. They stop the migrants, shake them down, rob them, leave them naked at the side of the road, or in the desert. These are the low level malandros, of course. The boys, the desperate men without any hope of making real money, those just dredging a living from the bottom of that poisoned river before they become casualties. So they kill forty migrants, for no reason at all. They don’t know who exactly did it. Some think it was maybe even the federal police, trying to get away with it by pinning the blame on the cartels. No one knows. No one will ever know, I’m sure. Forty people just dead.”
   
The old man thought about this and then he turned away from Xavi and began walking further into his labyrinth.
   
“I’m sorry,” Xavi said. “I shouldn’t have told you. Where are you going?”
   
Melquiades turned. “Don’t apologize. I’m just going for a walk. I’ll be fine. I hope you can find your own way out. If not, eventually someone will show you the way.” Xavi watched the old man trundle off into the shadows. Then he ascended the ladder and found the novel he was seeking. While he was up there, the name of the Italian painter came to him, arriving suddenly from the same void into which it had vanished, the void of forgotten memories and forgotten knowledge that, surely, must occupy some physical space in the universe, like dark matter.
   
“Melquiades,” he shouted down the dark corridor. “Melquiades…” but the old man had already disappeared.
   
“Archimboldi.”

~

Also during the spring, Xavi wrote more frequently for Armando. They were mostly little vignettes depicting scenes he’d witnessed around the city: a funeral procession or wedding fiesta, a lover’s quarrel outside the Amulet, a conversation between whores. Xavi attached a brief note to one of these pieces, about his most recent visit to Melquiades, and their discussion on evil.

Why do you keep publishing these? They aren’t about anything, really. There’s no narrative or point. I don’t want to be some charity case. Unfortunately, this is what I can write, at least for the time being. I’ve tried to write more - write bigger, if you will - and it’s always awful. Anyway. Thank you.

Armando replied quickly.

Xavi,
   
I like your perspective. It’s a romantic perspective, and we need a bit of that in this city, voided of romance as it is. Scenes like yours add texture to the city, depth. More than that, they make San Rafael seem like a hopeful place, which is something not a lot of folks seem to think. It’s nice to be reminded of the beauty here, the humanity, even if we’re only reminded on a very minor scale.
   
Do you have a cell phone? If you do, my number is 555-1710. Call me this week (or write, if you don’t have a phone, but I’m going to be out of town for a little while and don’t know when I’ll get your letter). I have a little expedition I’d like you to go on. If you’re looking to write ‘bigger,’ this will be, perhaps, an opportunity.
   
Yours, Armando

“I’m not so sure about this Armando guy, kid,” Octavia said. “Who is he? Does he exist? Is he real?”
   
“He gave me his phone number. I’m going to call him.”
   
“He seems like a very shady character to me, kid. Very shady indeed.”
   
They were at the Chinese restaurant again. The only other patrons were a large American family with rowdy kids wearing ponchos from the Indian market.
   
“Does he pay you?” she asked.
   
“Sometimes, yeah. And when he doesn’t, he always pays me more than double the next time. Or more than triple, if he doesn’t pay me the next time.”
   
Octavia shook her head, looped her chopsticks through her hair.
   
Xavi shrugged.
   
“I have a question,” Octavia asseverated.
   
“Ok.”
   
“Don’t be offended, ok, kid?”
   
“Sure.”
   
“How do you pay for your apartment? Where does the money come from? You were living there even before you started writing for this shadowy Armando. I don‘t mean to pry, but I keep having these nightmares where you‘re some low level malandro. Not that I think you are. But I guess stranger things have happened. It‘s hard to know who to trust, is all. Especially in this city.”
   
“You have nightmares about me?”
   
“Daymares,” she said. “I should have been more specific.”
   
“My mom left me money when she died. Not much, of course. A very small amount. But she’d saved it during her life, diligently. She left half to me and half to my half-sister, who used her money to cross over. Which mom had strictly forbidden her to use the money for, of course.”
   
Octavia smiled, their food arrived, and that was the last time they talked about his family.
   
The next day Xavi called Armando, who picked up on the second ring. His voice was higher than Xavi expected. It did not fit his handwriting, which was declarative and firm.
   
“Xavi, wow, hey, good to meet you, officially. Or, semi-officially.”
   
Xavi didn’t recognize his accent, either.
   
“You, too.”
   
“Well, hey, I wanted you to call because I’ve got something I want you to check out. Or, someone I want you to talk to. You said you wanted to write bigger, or that you were trying to write bigger.”
   
“Sure.”
   
“I’d like you to meet up with a police investigator I know. He’s a good guy, which is saying something for a cop in the city. He keeps the external sources of income to an absolute minimum, so you don’t have to worry about getting mixed up in anything fucked.”
   
“Are you sure about this? We’ve never met. I‘m just some shitty poet.”
   
“Yeah, absolutely. Look, you’re a good writer. And it ain’t easy to find good writers willing to work hard for inconsistent pay. Which is actually what I’m dealing with right now, the issue of pay… I’m out of town for a little while, but when I come back, I assure you, I’ll have enough money for the next year, accounting for interest on the pay you’ve lost, too.”
   
“I appreciate that.”
   
“I’ve got to run. The investigator’s name is Miguel Angel Espinoza. Meet him tomorrow at noon at Café Veracruz.” Then, before Xavi could ask any questions, Armando hung up.

~

Xavi arrived at Café Veracruz, on Calle Lago in Colonia Tierra Norte at 11:30 and ordered a coffee. It was a simple restaurant, square tables with red tablecloths and a coffee bar. The place was already crowded. Many of the diners were municipal police, who talked lewdly amongst small groups, telling raunchy jokes, eating huge plates of juevos rancheros or enchiladas or chili relleno. Xavi felt out of place sitting by himself; he’d brought a notebook. He felt like everyone else was a regular, and being an imposter (and a lonely one at that) drew attention his way. Of course, maybe that was just self absorption and paranoia. Maybe Café Veracruz was the kind of place, ubiquitous in San Rafael, where one could go and eat without being asked any questions. He ordered another coffee.
   
Three minutes before noon, Miguel Angel Espinoza arrived. Xavi could tell it was him immediately. Apparently the recognition was mutual, because the inspector made a beeline directly for Xavi’s table. He was short and sturdy, very clean cut. He wore straight jeans and simple boots and a black t-shirt. He was basically the kind of guy Xavi would figure to be a cop, the kind of guy who was probably a decent bantamweight in his youth, with quick hands but slow feet. Faint scars latticed his face, like a stone in the desert that had been scoured for thousands of years.
   
“Xavier?” he said after already sitting down.
   
“Inspector Espinoza.”
   
“Just call me Angel.”
   
“Ok. Angel.”
   
They shook hands and Angel immediately hailed the waitress, snapping for her, and ordering himself a water and an orange, peeled. Xavi offered him a cigarette, but Angel declined.
   
“No cigarettes or coffee,” he said. “There’s too many temptations. They’re easy, and lazy. Just water and fruit for me. Put your notebook away.”
   
Xavi put it into his bag.
   
“Are you eating anything?”
   
“No. I was waiting for you.”
   
“Are you hungry?”
   
Xavi shrugged.
   
“Ok, good.”
   
The waitress arrived with Angel’s orange and water. He ate deliberately, using a fork and knife. Xavi’d never seen anyone eat an orange with a fork and knife before.
   
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Angel asked between bites.
   
“No.”
   
Angel nodded, a terse nod, wasting no motion.
   
“I have too many women. That’s the one indulgence I’ll give myself. Cunt. I’m addicted to it. What’s the only point of life? Fucking, to fuck. To get fucked. What motivates us? Fucking. It’s the only reason we want money, or power. Because with money or power it becomes easier to fuck who we want to fuck.” He smiled as if stumbling across a revelation. “The killing, the drugs, the guns. All of it just to fuck. All so some poor sad street urchin can put his cock into the finest chingada possible. And there’s always somebody with a finer chingada. There’s always finer pussy to be had than the pussy you’re fucking. That’s what they think,” Angel said, pointing his fork at Xavi and crossing his legs. “Not me. Whatever pussy I’m fucking is the finest pussy in the history of the world.”
   
“I agree.”

Angel smiled, showing small, imperfect but very white teeth. He drank his entire glass of water in one long, measured draught.
   
“You’ve never fired a gun before,” Angel said.
   
“No.”
   
“Let’s go then.”
   
Xavi followed Angel to his car across the street, a dusty grey Buick with tinted windows. They drove west out of the city on the Border Highway. Across the river the orderly streets of Texas shone like scrubbed slate beneath the hot, late spring sun. They headed for the mountains, turning off the highway and following a packed dirt road through a pass in the hills. Xavi wanted a cigarette, but he wasn’t going to ask Angel to roll the windows down. Instead he thought about Octavia. He remembered dancing with her at the concert, the way her forearms fell behind his neck. The pressure of her hips against his thumbs. He thought about all the ways he should tell her he loved her. He thought about taking her out for a nice dinner. Or he thought about writing her a poem. Or he thought about just turning to her sometime, when they were in his hallway, and saying,
   
“You know, Octavia, I love you.”
   
He hadn’t told her though, even though he was certain she knew, and even though he was certain that, in her own way, she loved him, too. Why else would she come over so often? Why else would she share her poetry with him? Why else would she have danced with him like that? He’d taken to scrutinizing her every move, looking for hints as to whether she seemed more affectionate or less than the last time he’d seen her. Did she hug him for longer? Did she smile more? Was she leaning away from him at dinner? It was foolish stuff, asinine and destructive. Obsessive, even. But he couldn’t help it. If he just told her he loved her it might put an end to all that silliness. Yet something stopped him.
   
They were descending the opposite side of the mountains. A thousand miles of desert lay ahead, barren, inhospitable land that, somehow, Xavi’s forebearers had lived on for centuries. He thought about his father. Ildefonso. Born on the side of a canyon to an Indian mother who died during childbirth and a stern, retributive Spanish father who never forgave his only son for the death of his wife. Xavier’s grandfather, Valentino, had been a missionary. As his son grew into the ghost of his dead wife, disdain for the boy consumed him. He sensed that every similarity between the son and the woman of whom he dreamt was God mocking him, punishing him for loving a mestizo. God, Valentino learned, was cruel and vindictive. He saw it in the boy’s charcoal irises, his epicene and attenuated jaw line.   
   
When Ildefonso was eleven, Valentino abandoned him at a Jesuit orphanage somewhere deep in the desert between Huitzilopochtli and Cuauhtemoc; when Ildefonso was thirteen he ran from the orphanage and into desert with no food and no water. When a band of nomadic shepherds found him in a gully, unconscious and dying of dehydration, his intractable faith in the almighty was born.
   
Looking out at the Sonora’s numbing expanse, Xavi’s mind hurt trying to calculate the possible computations that led those shepherds to that very gully on that very day - their own fathers and mothers, their fathers’ fathers and their mothers’ mothers, the notoriously unreliable migratory patterns of Mexican sheep, the stochastic route his father must have taken through the indecipherable and terrifying desert, his decision to leave at the very hour he did, to collapse in the very spot he fell (did his small body resemble a stone from afar? the body of a coyote? or was he just a shadow amidst the immense arid plateau? at what point did he materialize as a boy to one of the shepherds?), the thousands of years of meteorological patterns that deigned that that very afternoon was sunny and clear - and what all those computations could have meant, r.e. the status of his own, that is Xavi’s, existence.
   
After that were his father’s years with the nomads: the fevers and the scorpions and the snakes, the flash floods, random death lurking beneath every step. There were the women he espied, the stories to which he listened, the languages he slowly learned. He learned the desert the way most people learned cities. His hands learned the most efficient and merciful way to kill a goat. His soul learned to love the earth and worship the sky. He learned when to speak and when to listen. He learned how to seduce girls. He learned how to preach without proselytizing, how to debate without condescending. He learned to make fire. His body learned to go days without water and weeks without a bed. He never learned to read; he didn’t need to.
   
And all of it led to him eventually riding out of the desert into the foreign labyrinth of San Rafael. Why? And why then? These were mysteries to which there were no answers. There were only extrapolations and inventions.
   
It occurred to Xavi that they’d been driving for nearly two hours. The afternoon light was fattening, the sun burning itself toward the distant, invisible sea. It also occurred to him that he had no idea who this Angel was, and really, no idea who Armando was, or why he’d conscripted Xavi to meet with a stoic, vaguely malicious man who would drive him two hours into the empty desert where there just so happened to be no other cars around, and where absolutely no one back in San Rafael would know to look for them. Suddenly he started to sweat. His throat dried. He tried to control his pulse, with little success. He thought about the bodies of women found in the Sonora, decomposed and naked, strangled and raped. He wondered, now, what they must have felt in the car on the drive out. If they had any idea they were going to their death. If there was a moment of clarity, where it struck them with finality, that the man beside them was the invisible man no one could find; that the journey they were on was not to get a drink, or a bite to eat, or to have a quick fuck back at his place. Did they watch the mountains recede in the rearview mirror, the residual glow of their city? Did they watch the anonymous desert unfold like a Godless blip in the universe, an invisible land of silence, where anything was permitted and nothing sacred? Did they pray or cry or beg for mercy, or did they try to convince themselves that, no, they were letting their imaginations get the better of them, that obviously this couldn’t be the last hour of their life, because there was no way that they could actually find themselves suddenly caught in the omniscient path of such unrepentant violence?
   
“Would you mind rolling the window down?” Xavi asked, forcing his voice to remain steady. “I could really use a cigarette.”
   
Angel looked at him ambivalently, shrugged, and rolled the windows down. Hot, dry air flushed through the car.
   
“Where are we going?” Xavi asked after lighting the cigarette and taking three deep drags that scorched his throat.
   
Angel leaned forward, almost against the windshield, and he pointed towards the northwest horizon. There, cobbled together on the flat rocky plain, was a small colony of buildings that shone in the late day light like limpid stones beneath a shallow stream. “San Theodosius,” Angel said.
   
A little later they pulled into the town, as it was, or what happened to remain of the town. It was only four streets, all of them built around the dilapidated central square of what had once been a Coenobitic monastery. The monastery, built of adobe, had long been abandoned to vagabonds and birds. Its bell tower flaked, gradually coming apart, its once hard-edges rounded like glass smoothed by the flow of water. The streets were left to mongrel children and men so old that they seemed too tired to even look at Angel’s car moving slowly down their streets.
   
At the northern terminus of town the border fence ran unimpeded in both directions, hideous and malignant and covered in profane graffiti, pictures of genitals, hopeless protestations. It seemed the only artists to venture this far were angry ones, or cynical ones, or maybe they’d been hopeful and the sight of the fence was too much for any decent spirit to endure. Angel drove about a mile along the fence until he came to a lot that was a scrap yard or a dump, or possibly even a graveyard. It was filled with garbage and rusting metal, abandoned machinery, some of it quite old. Near the lot’s center was a cinder block structure, maybe eight feet high, and roofless. It was the size of a bedroom. A tarp, that was connected to the building by two frayed ropes, lay on the ground, rumpled and worn. Rancid water had pooled between its folds. Angel kicked his way through the junk. Paths had been picked through the garbage, seemingly at random, and they ran in all directions, as if someone blind had carved them. Angel moved a piece of warped plywood from an opening in the building. Xavi stood at a distance.
   
“Well, come on,” Angel said, motioning into the building.
   
Inside were the ashy remains of small fires. The walls were charred black. The interior, despite being open to the sun, smelled dankly of piss and shit. Garbage piled like driftwood in the corners. At the base of the northern wall was another piece of plywood. Xavi looked up, briefly. The sky was impenetrable as a mausoleum. Angel knelt down.
   
“Help me with this,” he said.
   
Xavi knelt down on the other side and they lifted the plywood aside. Beneath it was an opening, barely large enough for a body to fit through. Steps had been built from the earth and led underground.
   
“Wow,” Xavi said.
   
Angel smiled, showing his small, imperfect teeth.
   
“What’s down there?”
   
Angel shrugged. “Corpses.”
   
Xavi felt the color fall from his face.
   
Angel laughed, coolly. “No. It’s just a tunnel. There’s a generator somewhere around here, and that runs power down there. There’s lights on the wall. It leads into the middle of a the desert on the other side.”
   
“For drugs?”
   
“Guns, actually. And girls, too.”
   
After a minute of staring into the blackness of the tunnel they finally put the plywood back. They walked back to Angel’s car. He opened the trunk. He pulled out a gun, a rifle. He loaded it.
   
“This is an AR-15. Also known as the M-16. The major firearm of the United States military. This, however, is the semi-automatic version.” He unloaded it, and tossed one of the bullets to Xavi. “That’s a Remington .223. Identical, in all but name, to the 5.56 by 45 milimeter NATO, which, again, is standard issue in the US military. Now, you‘d think that that means it’s designed to inflict maximum damage. And in a sense, it is. It impacts at high velocity, yaws, and fragments, effectively exploding inside you. But because so much of the damage is tertiary, it basically means you‘re either just seriously disabled, or you die a long, slow death. Toss it here,” he said. Xavi threw him the bullet. “Now, it used to be that there were limits on the size of the clip you could own. The amount of bullets, basically. And there still are, in some places. But not in Texas. As long as your gun’s a center fire rifle - as this one is - there are no restrictions on the size of the magazine.” Angel loaded the gun again and set it on his trunk. He jogged across the lot, and picked something up. It was the emaciated corpse of a dog. He set it on a cinder block, picked up the rifle, and took twenty-five paces. He unleashed three shots, in rapid succession. The tat-tat-tat of the shots ricocheted and reverberated off the tin of the border fence so that, for a moment, it sounded as if they were being fired upon at all sides. They were deafening. The first shot missed, slightly low, but the other two ripped into the corpse. Angel strode over to the body, motioned for Xavi.
   
“See, they leave a clean entry. But once you get inside, it’s a disaster.” Angel produced a knife and he opened the dog’s belly, sticking his hand into the putrefied insides. “Look,” he said, “it’s just mush.” He pulled out fragments of bullet, like little pieces of shrapnel. “That’s your liver, or that’s your intestines, or your lungs. That’s your spine.” He smiled sadistically. “Here,” he said, handing the gun to Xavi. “Your turn.”
   
“I don’t know how to shoot.”
   
“It’s easy. You pull the trigger. Any dickhead can do it. Just aim a little low, and prepare for the kickback.”
   
Xavi put the gun against his shoulder, took aim slightly beneath the dog’s corpse, and pulled the trigger twice. The gun throttled into his shoulder; the shots sprayed wildly into the air. Angel laughed quietly to himself.
   
“Wasn’t prepared for that,” Xavi said. His shoulder throbbed from the impact.
   
“It’s like fucking,” Angel said. “You don’t know what to expect the first time. Now you know.”
   
“Yeah, sure. Now I know.”
   
Xavi braced himself. He fired off two more shots: both wild, but slightly less so. The problem wasn’t the first shot; it was how rapidly the second shot went off, and he was unable to steady himself for it. “Fuck,” he muttered. He felt the heat of the afternoon for the first time. Once more he took aim. Two more shots. The first one kicked up dust, but the second one dug its way into the dead dog.
   
“Hey!” Xavi shouted, unexpectedly gleeful.
   
Angel clapped and walked over to take the AR-15.
   
“Now, the one problem with the AR-15, at least with the most common models, is that the ammo is easily deflected or stopped by body armor. It’s not so good for killing cops, or military. Street urchins and punks? Perfect. Shoots as fast as you can pull your finger, so you can mow them down. But cops? That’s a different story.” He un-holstered the gun on his belt and handed it to Xavi. “FN 5.7. A Belgian gun. The cop killer.”  He handed it to Xavi. From the trunk of his car he produced a bullet proof vest, which he draped across a sheet of tin. “Shoot.”
   
Xavi took aim, and fired. The kickback was extraordinary, again; the violence of shooting the gun mirrored the violence of its result. Who would enjoy such a thing? Sadists like Angel, he assumed, whom Xavi liked, anyway, despite the fact that he still had moments where he thought the cop was going to put a bullet in his head and throw him into the tunnel, for no reason other than the fact that he could. Xavi wondered what it felt like to possess that kind of violence, or the possibility of that violence. He wondered about its scope and its feel and its size, if it compared to anything else in the world, perhaps love or literature. He wondered how a single man could carry something so total and ruinous. But they did, of course, and they moved amongst the world like hawks, beautiful and feral in their destructiveness. Why? Why did such people exist? How could they? And what was poetry in the face of their nihilism? What was journalism, or literature? They were pitiful gestures of faith. Angel looked back at him, smiling, giving a thumbs up.
   
“Good shooting,” he said. He removed the bullet proof vest. Behind it, the sheath of tin had been puncture in four places, shot clean through. Angel strode confidently towards him, and took back the gun. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s go.”
   
They drove back across the desert and into the mountains. By then, the hills were glowing a faint violet, their crags and dells accentuated, the way a lover’s face might be heightened by a lamp. They rode mostly in silence, Xavi staring out the window at the endless scrublands, the creosote and mesquite, the lands navigable only by the cosmos, or by the long memory of the heart. At some point Angel put a football match on the radio, between two teams neither man cared about.
   
“What do you do about the guns?” Xavi finally asked. They were driving through the mountains, passing the large gated estates that perched on the hillsides like lonely herons or storks. The city was not yet visible, though the eastern sky blushed with the miasma of light rising from San Rafael’s caldera.
   
Angel shrugged, turning off the football match. “Whatever I’m paid to do.”
   
“What does that mean?”
   
“It means someone says there’s guns coming through, here’s money to do something about it.”
   
“And what happens to the guns?”
   
Angel smiled, and shrugged.
   
“You sell them?”
   
“Or use them.”
   
“What do you do about the girls?”
   
“What we’re paid to do.”
   
“Which is what?”
   
Angel looked at Xavi, his face mostly obscured by falling night. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

~

That night Xavi dreamt he was standing on a hillside of tall thin trees. It was snowing, gently, so that an inch or two had accumulated on the ground and on the boughs of the trees. Xavi was with three nameless men, even though, in that way of dreams, he knew they were supposed to be good friends of his. The four of them dug a grave in the permafrost. They worked about three-quarters of the way up the hillside, and all around them were other, similar hillsides covered with tall thin trees, and where other groups of men dug graves, too. Some of the groups had set fires, and these fires were the only glimmers of color amongst the otherwise grey world. The snow, the earth, the sky, the trees, all were grey. Only the fires, burning irregularly. Xavi and the three nameless friends worked in silence. Whose grave was it? The question hung between them, devoured them. Whose grave were they digging? Occasionally the trees shook and swayed with wind, and clumps of snow would fall wetly on their heads. The grave grew deeper without an answer. Snow softly blanketed the rumpled dirt at the bottom of the grave. Wind toyed with the trees. They dug in silence. Whose?

~

That next Tuesday, Octavia didn’t show up. Xavi didn’t think anything of it; she rarely came on Tuesdays. Instead, he put the finishing touches on his article for Armando and read a hundred pages or so of  “La Difunta Correa.” Then he turned off his light, masturbated, and fell asleep early.
   
When Octavia didn’t show on Wednesday, Xavi was slightly concerned, but mostly he was perturbed. She knew about his meeting with the inspector, and he was anxious to tell her about it. He tried to call her twice, but she didn’t answer. He sent her a text, asking where she was. He fell asleep in bed, waiting for an answer, too annoyed to read, write, or jack off.
   
When she didn’t visit on Saturday or Sunday, Xavi’s annoyance turned to dread. He called her frantically, but by then her phone had died or been shut off. All his calls went directly to voice mail. He left her a few voice mails, each of increasing desperation. He sent her six text messages, hopelessly. He thought about calling the police. Women in San Rafael still disappeared on a regular basis, even if the trickle of bodies had slowed. He reasoned and rationed with himself. Octavia was too smart, too savvy, to find herself in the wrong kind of company; but sometimes evil was implacable, and there was nothing to be done to stop it. Octavia had just disappeared, as she warned him; but they’d grown close enough, and she clearly cared about him enough, that she wouldn’t have disappeared without at least tipping him off.
   
He finally fell asleep close to dawn, his mind having exhausted itself.
   
He woke up a few hours later and took a bus to Felipe Munoz’s apartment in Colonia Cortes, across the highway from Sangre del Toro. Munoz shared a top floor apartment with his mother, younger brother, and two younger sisters. The building was one of the first mass tenements hurriedly built to accommodate the influx of workers in the 1980’s. Already, it was beginning to crumble. Only half of the elevators worked, and the stairways that cantilevered along the outside of the building had been covered by a chain-link netting.
   
Xavi knocked and Munoz’s mother let him in. The apartment itself was small and messy. It had a small bedroom, a filthy kitchen, and a living area that was barely big enough for one tattered couch and a dining room table. Munoz was down the hall, showering, his mother said. She was going around the apartment, swooping up scattered articles of clothing and depositing them into a laundry basket. After she’d filled the basket to brimming, she handed it to Xavi.
   
“Here, make yourself useful,” she said, while she ran a bucket of water. She was a thin, sinewy woman with a faded tattoo on her left forearm. She wore a bandana, and had tiny facial features, tiny wrists, a pert tiny chest that was visible beneath a stained grey t-shirt. “Go on up to the roof,” she said. “I’ll be up in a minute. Lipe likes to take long showers. The pervert jacks off in there for hours. You’ve got nothing but time. Esperanza is up there. She’ll help you.”
   
Xavi emerged on the roof, where Munoz’s sixteen year old sister Esperanza was sitting in jean shorts and a bikini top, smoking. She was more buxom than her mother, although still lissome and hipless. She was laying on top of a towel that she’d spread across the tar rooftop. The netting from the stairwells extended about five meters above the roof, surrounding the building’s exterior.
   
“Who are you?” Esperanza asked.
   
“A friend of Lipe’s.”
   
The girl nodded.
   
“What’s with the webbing?” Xavi asked.
   
Esperanza looked around her as if she were noticing the netting for the first time. She shrugged. “I dunno. It’s always been here. I think they had a problem with people jumping. That was probably before we moved here.” Clothes lines had been hooked through the netting and criss-crossed the roof like spindles of silk. Munoz’s mother arrived, lugging a bucket of water and a washboard. She pulled a piece of basalt from the pocket of her jeans and started to scrub away at the clothes. When she finished an article, she would hand it to Xavi, who then hung it from one of the lines. Esperanza had the bucket of clothes pins, which she eventually dumped salaciously onto her well oiled stomach, forcing Xavi to pick them delicately, as if they were guarded by adders.
   
“Lipe told me you work in the factories,” Xavi finally said to Munoz’s mother.
   
“Oh, yes. Me and Esperanza both do. I had to start again when my husband died.”
   
“Where?”
   
“Lear, on Calle Lindbergh. We were working for Foxconn, but we’d spent a long time trying to organize a union. Things turned nasty. They were treating Esperanza badly because of me. So we left. We got out of there six weeks before the explosion last summer. I’m sure you heard about it.”
   
Xavi couldn‘t remember anything concrete; it must have happened while he and Tomas were on one of their trips.
   
“Six people died. Including two women I was very close with, rest their souls. That’s why we’d been trying to organize a union. The safety conditions were awful. We knew something terrible was going to happen. It was only a matter of time. We told them, but no one listened. Now they’re paying for it, although not much. The government doesn’t care about safety. They just care that the companies don’t leave. So they give them tax breaks, and don’t show up for safety inspections, and offer to run safety trainings so that the companies don’t have to waste time on them.” She sighed.
   
“It’s better at Lear?”
   
“A little, sure. Nowhere is that much better. But I don’t feel like I’m waiting for a bomb to explode, if that’s what you mean.”
   
Xavi went to fetch another clothes pin. Munoz’s mother finally looked over at her daughter, the pile of clothes pins sprawled on her stomach.
   
“Ay, chica, what are you doing?”
   
Esperanza looked at her mother over her sunglasses, casting her a soldering glare. Munoz finally appeared on the roof, his hair wet and shaggy.
   
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
   
“Whose going to help me finish the laundry?” his mother asked.
   
“Have her do it,” Munoz said, motioning to his reposed sister.
   
“I work for a living,” Esperanza objected.
   
Munoz threw his hands in consternation before leaving the women by themselves. He and Xavi went down to the highway, which was a wide and hauntingly empty boulevard lined with melancholy desert willows that stood alone at regular intervals, like bedraggled travelers waiting for a bus that will never arrive, or like abandoned lovers.
   
“Octavia’s gone,” Xavi said.
   
“She does that.”
   
“I was thinking of calling the police.”
   
“Don’t do that.”
   
“Why?”
   
“What’s the point?”
   
“What if something happened?”
   
“If something happened she’s already dead. It’s not like the police would do anything anyway. All it would do is make you look crazy if, and when, she comes back. This is what she does. She’s told you herself.”
   
Xavi pulled out a cigarette and offered Munoz one. They were moving southwest, towards a cluster of maquiladoras. A dilapidated school bus with a mattress strapped to the roof trundled past, kicking up a spume of dust and rock. Across the street two couples were sitting together on a ruined bench, smoking cigarettes and laughing. They were probably fourteen or fifteen. The boys wore wife beaters, and had scrawny, tattoo-less arms. The girls were slightly overweight, wearing jeans that were too tight and earrings that were too large for their still pudgy, unhardened faces. They were probably sisters. Xavi watched them while he and Munoz walked. The boys showed off. One of them had a skateboard. He tried doing tricks, but mostly fell on his ass, to the delight of the others. The other boy, who wore a big crucifix, had his arm around the shorter and pudgier of the two girls. Her stomach toppled over the top of her jeans in a strangely endearing way. Without warning she nestled her head into the crux of the boy’s neck, and, almost reflexively, he bent over and kissed her on the forehead. Xavi thought, then, about how impossible love was, and how desperate we were for it. How desperate everyone was to communicate honestly, even with near strangers. But what could really be said that mattered? He thought about Octavia. He didn’t know anything about her, save for what he intuited (and what, really, was intuition: sexual desire? the belief, based on some numinous current, that another person might understand you?), and that she loved poetry. They’d talked about death, sure, and about writing, but what could anyone say honestly about those things? What could be known about them? You tried to create shapes and figures out of words, shapes and figures for things that were entirely beyond you, and maybe beyond anyone.

“Can we sit down, Lipe?” Xavi asked.
   
“Sure. You ok?”
   
They found a bench and sat, smoking. Xavi watched the kids across the broad avenue, an avenue that reminded him of communism and tanks and imposing governmental buildings where stone faced men and women trudged about their duties, unquestioning, because that was what was asked of them. Instead there were the lonely trees, the distant maquiladoras, the two young couples flirting. He wondered if any of them would remember this afternoon. If the boy would remember that dip of the girl’s head; if the girl would remember how effortlessly the boy kissed her forehead. Maybe the boys would grow up to be malandros or rapists or something worse. Maybe the girls would just become insecure whores, or go to work in the maquis. How could anyone know, just by looking at them? He wanted more for them; what that more was, he couldn‘t say.
   
“Do you believe in evil, Lipe?”
   
“Evil? What do you mean by that?”
   
“I don’t know. Whatever we consider evil to be. All those women who disappeared. Or the men who run the cartels. Or the men who run these factories. You know, evil. Do you believe in it?”
   
Munoz dragged his cigarette.
   
“Hadn’t much thought about it.”
   
“No?”
   
“Not really. Have you?”
   
“Not really, no, I suppose. At least not deeply. I guess as a kid I believed that evil existed and you’d recognize it when you saw it. As if it were something malignant that you could see, in the eyes, or maybe something you could smell. Now I look people and I don’t know. If it even exists, or if I could recognize it if it did.”
   
“The way I see it, most people you’re talking about are just trying to make money. The cartels and the factories. Does that make them evil? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t have a choice in it. Not that they’re born evil but that they’re born into a system that doesn’t give them a choice but to make money.”
   
“So it’s the system.”
   
“Sure.”
   
“But it’s people that uphold that system. How else would it survive?”
   
Munoz crushed his cigarette. He nodded to the kids. “I remember being that age. Taking out the chubby girls because they were the first ones to have real tits. Getting hand jobs in abandoned houses. Sucking on their soft, fat tits. The best erections of my life, I swear.”
   
Xavi smiled.
   
“What the fuck do you want me to say, Xavi? I don’t know shit about evil, strangely enough, despite living in this city. I’m sure Octavia’s fine. I don’t know where she is, or why she left. And I don’t know why you’re still hanging out with her if you aren’t even getting laid. I don’t know what you’re looking for, hombre.”
   
Munoz’s mom made them all dinner, some kind of pork soup with rice, and they ate sitting on the couch and watching the television. They watched melodramas and then they watched a football match. Xavi and Munoz watched television late into the night.There was a show that aired after the news on the local cable channel. It was, unimaginatively, titled “Talk of the Town,” and it was hosted by a former melodrama star, Carlos Reyes, a middle aged man with a striking, angular face who’d begun to go flabby in the chest and stomach. Reyes interviewed low level local celebrities and eccentric personalities, discussing mostly superficial matters about life in San Rafael (on one show, for instance, Reyes interviewed ….?). This particular night, Reyes happened to be interviewing the literary critic and blogger for the Luz de la Sonora, a newspaper out of Hermosilla. Her name was Rosalita Ramirez Medina. Reyes and Medina spent most of the hour discussing a new crime novel by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite. The discussion inevitably devolved into whether a Mexican living in America - in Iowa, at that (Reyes practically spat the word Iowa out in disdain) - could still write about issues concerning Mexicans, or whether Crosthwaite - who’d gone so far as to write two novels in English - had been irrevocably Anglicized. It was a common argument in literary circles: how does one write about place? Especially a place that one no longer lives? It was a sensitive topic for Latin American literary aficionados, and especially for the Mexican literati, since most of the best Mexican literature was being either written not by Mexicans, or by Mexicans who’d emigrated. At one point, Medina - who had short trimmed black hair that was probably dyed, and thick horn rimmed glasses, and wore bright crimson lipstick (she looked, Xavi thought, like the female heroine of a Mexican crime novel) - mentioned the poet Juan Carlos Ortega. “Say what you will about Ortega’s contemporary poetry,” Medina said, “And I think that it’s mostly pedestrian. But at least he’s stayed in country.” “Yes,” Reyes said, “but he’s not exactly a vocal proponent of Mexican literature. He’s mostly holed up in his ivory tower, disengaged.” Medina nodded somberly, as if this were a great tragedy. “True. It’s a shame to see such a fine writer who refuses to use those gifts to engage in a dialogue, and has instead chosen the monologue.”
   
“I’m surprised Reyes knows anything about poetry,” Munoz said.
   
Near the end of the hour, Reyes smiled slyly at Medina. “Ms. Medina, before you go, I do want to ask you, briefly, about some rumors we’ve heard. Or some whispers.” Medina smiled expectantly, flirtatiously. “You already know what I’m talking about, Ms. Medina?” “I have an idea.” Reyes leaned forward. “Suarez,” he said, “the modern day Borges, they call him.” “Yes, if only Borges had written novels.” “Well, yes, of course.” Medina smiled for a long time, her face taut on the screen, almost like a corpse’s. “It seems true, from what I hear, that Suarez is going to be releasing a novel in the very near future about San Rafael,” she said, “and about the cartel culture in San Rafael. Yes, this is true, from what I’m told.” “Do you have any more information for us, Ms. Medina? Did Suarez spend time in our city? Did he infiltrate the cartels?” “It’s hard to separate fiction from fact when it comes to Suarez. He’s done a remarkable job at blurring the two. Some people even say that his first novel is somewhat autobiographical, that he was taken into the jungle by Peron’s men, that he was slated to disappear, and only through chance did he survive. Others say that he wasn’t anywhere near Argentina in the early 70’s. No one knows with any certainty; there are only the books. And so it will be with this one. Beyond it being a critical look at the cartel violence in San Rafael, I don’t know anything.” Reyes smiled again, the broad, winning smile of a man whose entire life had been built upon the charm and fake honesty of that smile. “Well, Ms. Rosalita Ramirez Medina, from Luz de la Sonora, thank you for joining us. Until next time, this is Carlos Reyes.”
   
By then, Munoz had fallen asleep on the couch. Xavi settled in on the floor, but he was awake all night listening to the baleful yowls of the freight trains that, like keening pilgrims from a distant land, crawled to and from the maquiladoras.

~

On the way to the bus stop the next morning, Xavi bought a coffee from the back of a truck selling coffee and tortillas. He moved through the world in that heightened, hallucinatory state that came after a sleepless night. The morning was more acute, and somehow miraculous. He felt like the muscles in his arms and legs had been frayed by a dull knife. It was moments like this when Xavi sometimes felt that the world was two dimensional, or maybe one dimensional. That he could reach out to the horizon, if he really tried, and grab the mountains between his fingers. Or that, with the proper concentration, he could make people appear and disappear at will. Maybe, he thought, Octavia had disappeared because he’d planted the seed in his mind that she would eventually disappear. Maybe she was only gone because he’d willed her to be gone. Christ, he was thinking like a Borges story. Maybe she really had vanished, into another realm, or into the void, and would only reappear if he willed such a reappearance to happen. These were the kinds of preposterous thoughts that came when he didn’t sleep. He paid the old man and took his coffee and started walking. A ragged procession of women bound for the maquiladoras accompanied him. He saw Munoz’s mother a ways ahead of him, and Esperanza. He thought: please let Esperanza turn around. Her figure was so slender that it almost didn’t exist beneath her frock; she could easily hide behind a telephone pole. She turned around and looked at Xavi, but she didn’t wave or smile. Maybe she’d forgotten him. He held up a hand, but she turned away. How many times had some of these women made this walk in their lifetimes? What a thing it would be if it were possible to hold onto every detail of everyone of those walks: the smell of the air, the voices ebbing and rucking, the wind tumbling down the avenue. Xavi wondered if it were possible to ever fully know even a single square foot of the world, if a man could demarcate a square foot as his own, and then memorize and understand and learn every single detail of that square foot, or if elements of it would be forever elusive, forever shifting before the man could understand.
   
There was a woman who sometimes came to Tomas’ house, in the year after Xavi’s mother died. She was an older woman, in her mid-thirties, older than most everyone else who came. She and Tomas were sometimes lovers, but more often than that they would sit on the house’s small cement patio smoking cigarettes and drinking mescal and talking, sometimes for twenty-four, or even thirty hours at a time. Xavi didn’t know two people could talk for such extraordinary swaths of time. On other occasions Tomas would take her into his bedroom, and they would fuck loudly for an hour, two at most, and then she would leave. But usually they talked. Xavi once asked Tomas who she was. “She’s a performance artist,” he said. Her most famous act, which she reprised every few years, was to find an abandoned maquiladora - which was easy - and to set up a full length mirror, and a series of lamps. Then she would spend seventy-two or even ninety-six hours doing nothing but staring at herself in the mirror, fully naked. Three or four days just staring.
   
“Why?” Xavi’d asked.
   
“To notice how the body changes. To see the decay as it was happening. To notice the little lines forming, the hair follicles growing on her cunt, the pimples forming on her face. She figures maybe if you spend every moment watching, you can stave off aging. Maybe we only age because we aren‘t diligent, and we lose track of our own bodies.”
   
What Xavi didn’t say in response was: clearly she’s wrong. The artist, despite being in her mid-thirties, had the deeply creased face of a much older woman, and the sad, hollow eyes of someone well acquainted with death and failure. But he liked her after hearing what she did. And he often found himself studying his face in the mirror for as long as he could, trying to notice the imperceptible changes that must be occurring, every millisecond, that he only noticed every morning or night, when his body had gone unguarded for over twelve hours. Who knew what forces were at work during that time? After a while the artist finally stopped coming over. One day Xavi asked Tomas what had happened to her: had she and Tomas had a falling out? had they broken up? Tomas shrugged. “No. She’s just lost her mind, that’s all. They sent her to a nut house in Tijuana, where she has a brother. Sometimes she calls though, and we talk. But it’s not the same. She only gets an hour to talk every couple of days.”
   
Xavi liked that phrase: she’s just lost her mind. As if the mind were like one’s cell phone or wallet, or better yet, like a pen that could be misplaced and then never be found. He wondered if there mirrors in the asylum so that the artist could keep guard. He hoped there were.
   
What a strange thing to hope, he thought.
   
Then, maybe all we can hope for are these minor comforts.
   
What a poem that could make, if he were a better writer: a woman who has lost her mind staring intently at her face in an asylum mirror. Believing that if she just focused hard enough, nothing could ever be lost.
   
He turned north on an unmarked road. He walked into a seemingly placid residential neighborhood. The cinder block homes were small but mostly well maintained. Music drifted from somewhere, or from nowhere. Cheap vinyl music, scratchy and unsteady, like a voice battling tears. He decided to find its source. First he turned right. The music faded to almost a whisper and he was afraid he might lose it, so he backtracked and walked another block north. He couldn’t tell if the music was growing louder or fainter. He tried to concentrate his entire body on hearing. He turned left and walked a block. How could it be so hard to differentiate between volume and distance? He finally seemed to be moving closer. The music steadied, slightly. It was tango music, all castanets and brass. On the middle of the next block, in the small front yard of a plain house, two young girls were dancing with one another, circling an old record player. They were barefoot, and wearing cut off shorts and tank tops that showed the tiny nubs of their breasts. Maybe they were nine, or ten. Their hair was dark and moved freely as they danced, hanging loosely over their backs. They almost moved too perfectly for their age. Their steps were precise, measured. Their bodies moved absolutely in concert with each other. There were a lot of questions Xavi could ask. How did two girls so young know how to tango so perfectly? How could something like this share space with a world of maquiladoras and drug cartels and human traffickers and death? Why were they doing this now, at this hour, on a Tuesday morning? How had he possibly come across something so beautiful? But he didn’t ask himself any of these questions. Instead he just watched the two girls glide across the yard together, moving like two birds in flight. They danced for five minutes or twenty five minutes or two hours. He couldn’t say with any certainly. Eventually they stopped, their brows kneaded with sweat. The slightly taller of the two girls had the other girl dipped in her arms, so that the shorter girl’s back arched and her hair hung down like the trellises of a willow tree, nearly grazing the earth. They stayed frozen like this, and then, as if waking from a state of hypnosis, they laughed and fell to the ground in a chaotic jumble of arms and limbs.
   
They untangled themselves, waved to Xavi, and scampered inside.

~

Two days later a letter appeared in the editorial section of Luz de la Sonora.

It is a well known fact that writers make their trade in lying,
just as corporations make their trade in exploitation. It would
be wise for the citizens of Sonora to remember that you cannot
believe everything you read. The publishing industry is just an arm
of the state. And You have seen what the state has done to you.
How they have sold you down the river to slavery. ‘Watch out that
no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming,
“I am the Christ,” and will deceive many. At that time many will
turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, and
many false prophets will appear and deceive many people.’ There
is but one Father, and there is but one voice for His People.
El Hermandad.

It went mostly unnoticed. Those that did read it found it beguiling and peculiar.

~

On Sunday Octavia walked into his apartment as if nothing had happened. He sat on his mattress, reading, shirtless. He looked up and she stood in front of him wearing jeans and a black blouse. She wore the earrings he’d bought her. He closed his book. They stared at one another for a while before she broke into a slight, imploring smile.
   
“Don’t be mad, kid. I warned you.”
   
He didn’t respond.
   
“Don’t do this, please. Don’t act like you have some claim over me, or some control. Don’t be prideful about it. I like you because you don’t have that pride, that need for ownership. Besides, I got you a gift.”
   
He raised his eyebrows. She tossed him the book she was holding. It was a thin chapbook, small but beautifully bound.
   
“It’s your poems. The best ones.”
   
“How did you get them?”
   
She shrugged. “I stole them. Your room’s a mess. I figured you’d assume you had just misplaced them.”
   
“Well. It’s lovely.”
   
She knelt down at the edge of his mattress and crawled onto it so that she was perched above him on all fours. She put her hand on his neck and lifted his chin. He looked at her and tried to keep himself from crying. She smiled very slightly and then she kissed him.
   
“I’m sorry, kid.”
   
“Ok.”
   
She kissed him again, and slowly he slumped down the wall until she was straddling him. His hands were on her hips, her hands were still on his neck and she kissed him with an almost astonishing force, as if she were trying to extract something from him, or impart something intensely important. He tried to take her shirt off but she stopped him. She unbuttoned her jeans instead. Clumsily, she slid out of her pants and he hastily undid his jeans, too, but before he could get them completely off she had his dick out and was blowing him. It didn’t last long; maybe thirty seconds. Afterwards he was apologetic but she laughed, and laughed. After a few minutes he was hard again, but this time he fingered her first. Some of her pubic hair spilled out the side of her panties, which he liked.
   
“I want to go down on you,” he said.
   
“Ok, ok, fine, whatever,” she breathed heavily, pushing him down. She tasted clean, like water. He didn’t think he made her come, but after a while she stopped him, reassuring him that it had felt wonderful, and then she blew him again. This time he lasted a little longer. He thought it was the best orgasm of his life, better than the first one, which caught him too much by surprise to be enjoyed. This time he laughed, and she lay on her stomach, watching him bemusedly, her right hand cradling her head and her left hand on his pelvic bone.
   
“Where did you go?” he asked when he’d finally stopped laughing. He felt as if he’d stepped through some aperture, and had gained a new perspective on things, a perspective that was too new to be understood.
   
She shrugged and turned away from him to roll a cigarette.
   
“Come on,” he asked. “I want to know.”
   
“There are some things you’re going to have to accept not knowing about me, ok, kid?” She blew smoke into the air, like a figure in a movie.
   
“Ok.”
   
“But I like blowing you,” she said. “I’ve decided that. You have a lovely cock, and your hips drive me wild. And I like reading to you. And I obviously love talking with you, and eating with you. But when I disappear, you can’t call me like you did. You can’t send me all those texts. You have to let me go. I need you to do that for me.”
   
After she finished her cigarette they got dressed and went for Chinese food. Xavi told her about the literary critic from Luz de la Sonora, and Suarez. Then they came home and she blew him twice more and he went down on her again, and this time he absolutely made her come. In the morning, when he woke, Octavia was sitting on the floor in her blouse and underwear, legs crossed at the knee, reading Juan Carlos Ortega’s collection of poems, Epiphanies. She smiled at him, absently, and went back to reading. He watched her for a while and thought: thank god it wasn’t a dream.

~

Their pattern, inevitably, shifted. She came by more frequently, and they spent less time eating out. They still read a great deal, although more often than not they read in bed, half clothed or naked. And more often than not, a poem would be interrupted, and left unfinished, while Xavi went down on her, or while she jacked him off, or while they spent an hour kissing. There was an element of speed to these encounters. Before he could even take their full scope - what she was wearing, what she was reading, the modulations of her voice while he was eating her out - she’d be gone, and he was alone, feeling famished in a way he hadn’t ever experienced. And then, when he was alone, things slowed down, naturally. Whole afternoons seemed to languish for decades as he read, and then re-read, the same pages of Suarez. Each sentence was a small, meticulous world. The waiting and wondering was a kind of pristine torment he hadn’t experienced, either. Then, Octavia would open the door, and before he could pin down a single detail of her, it would be morning, she would be smoking a cigarette and doing up her hair and leaving.
   
He managed some snapshots, however. Octavia on her belly, bottomless, her legs aloft and kicking the air, engrossed in a new collection by some American poet dying of Alzheimer’s. Octavia on her back, laughing at his flaccid penis, her skin pulled taut against her ribs so that they resembled the hull of a ship. Octavia curling a strand of hair behind her ear, and in one exasperated motion, blowing smoke in his direction. But he hated to hold her in such static, objectified ways. It seemed antithetical to who she was.
   
Of course, what persisted more than those images was the ineffable sensation of being understood. Of sharing completely and openly. At some point - and he could not pinpoint when it was - they crossed a threshold and became completely at ease with one another. Again, he couldn’t say when it happened. Only that, one afternoon in July, lolling on his mattress, he realized that he was not afraid to say anything to her. But he also knew that he’d felt that way for some time; that the change had not occurred then, but had occurred earlier, without his noticing. Things he‘d once kept to himself, he began blurting out. He told her that he adored her cunt, how hairy it was. He told her about his half-sister, and how he’d once kissed her. He was no longer afraid to go on rambling, impassioned soliloquies about the importance of literature, his search for meaning, and his fervent beliefs about poetry.
   
“I think it begins with responsibility,” he said one evening, after she‘d jacked him off.
   
“What are you talking about?” she said.
   
“Poetry,” he said.
   
She laughed at him, which she liked to do, a kind of maternal laugh that somehow managed to be more affectionate than condescending.
   
“I think it begins with responsibility,” he said again. “I guess I’ve always considered writing as no different than football or music, or any other far-fetched pursuit. Think about a young, gifted footballer, the best on his local team. He’s gifted enough that all his peers and coaches tell him, ‘You’ve got a gift. You’ve got something special here.’ But the truth is that there are a hundred thousand gifted kids all over the world hearing the same seductive thing. So ultimately, it’s a question of is this kid willing to abandon the prospects of a normal life to find out how gifted he really is. Because he doesn’t really know for sure, does he? He thinks he could be supremely gifted, that he could be capable of creating this very pure form of beauty. But, naturally, he has his doubts. And the only way to find out for sure how gifted he really is, is total dedication, right? Dedication to the point of ruin, if he fails. And what no one tells him is that he is almost certain to fail. Because the kind of beauty he’s pursuing is the very extreme edge of beauty. Failure in the pursuit of this beauty has to be almost a certainty; if it weren’t, that extreme form of transcendent beauty would be cheapened, wouldn’t?”
   
“Sure. Probably.”
   
“So the ultimate question is this: if you have any gift at all, are you obligated to pursue that gift to its very end? Obligated at a basic human level to fail, to ruin your life for the very small chance that you might achieve something at its highest, most beautiful level? So that you might function at the very extreme of human possibility? It’s why mediocre writers and footballers and musicians are so important. They’re playing out the possibility that they could possibly be transcendent, that they might remind the rest of the
species what we, as humans, are capable of. That we aren’t just capable of awful forms, but that we can build beautiful things, too,” he said.
   
Octavia thought about this. Her chin rested on his chest. It hurt, like it was digging a shallow hole from his pectoral.
   
“It’s a romantic idea, sure. But great fiction and great poetry and great music and great football is essential stuff because it reminds us that the truth of humanity is not just exposing the ugly brutality of modern life. Of course, that’s essential, too. But what is more essential is to remember that we, as a species, are capable of grace, too. Great fiction and great poetry? That’s the stuff of grace, or at least grace of a certain sort. It’s someone standing at the brink of poverty and loneliness and ruin to show us beauty. To show us that ugliness and violence aren’t our only currencies. Do we have a responsibility to pursue grace, however transient and impermanent it might be in the face of war and murder and famine? Yes. Yes. Yes, yes, yes,” he asseverated. Then, as if completely spent, he fell silent, and the two of them lay in this silence the way a couple might sit amongst a copse of trees in a Keats’ poem. Then, finally, she kissed him on the bottom of his chin, the curve of his jaw, the tip of his nose. He laughed, and so did she, and when they stopped laughing she looked at him from a few inches away. She was so close that he could see the pores on the crown of her nose, the fine black hairs and the latticed capillaries inside her nostrils.
   
“I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry, kid. I shouldn’t say it. Because I can’t promise that I won’t stop loving you. But right now I love you, terribly.”
   
“I love you, too.”
   
Octavia, for her part, shared, too. She shared the kind of generic memories about her parents that men love for their one specific detail (the way that a generic poem can become memorable with one luminous image): how their voices sounded like soft rain behind their bedroom door, and how this susurrus seemed to hold the secret of adulthood;  how they spent a year saving up to buy a microwave and how, in a fit of rage, her father threw the thing out the kitchen window. She told him about how, when she lost her virginity, her grandfather walked in on her, and chased the boy, still naked, all the way back to his house.
   
In return, Xavi told her about riding into the desert with his father, the missionary. He told her how once a year his father would come out of the desert, and how when he did, he and Xavi’s mother would dance, late into the night, in the living room of his mother’s small house. They danced without music, just the two of them holding onto each other, dancing to the sounds of the house and the street and the summer night.
   
One night, while Xavi drifted between sleep and wakefulness, Octavia kissed him, and it was like being dragged into a different realm, where the only thing that existed were his carnal desires, and where Octavia was somehow disembodied from her memories and her poetry and everything else. Or, perhaps, a more accurate means of describing it, is that all of those aspects became fully concentrated in the slight droop of her breasts against the backs his hands, the brittleness of her pubic hair against his cock, the warmth of her lips on his ears, the wetness of her cunt on his fingers, the sweat at the crux of her ass, the sharp protuberance of her spine as she bent to kiss him, the faint wheaty aroma, like damp bread, that was entirely her’s and no one else’s. No part of Octavia existed beyond the liminal threshold of her body. It was a lifetime together distilled into one coupling. They fucked for no more than ten minutes, but, in the midst of it, it seemed to extend indefinitely. And once it was over, it seemed to have not happened at all, to have been culled from a rapidly receding dream. He lay beside her and could feel his heart resounding in the cavity of his chest, could feel the size of that space, and the force of the muscle, and he understood how such an instrument could eventually fail.

~
   
They spent most of the sweltering August in his apartment. He had no air conditioning, and his window fan had been bought from a man on the street who had probably scavenged it from one of the city’s illegal dumps. Sometimes it worked, but other times it sputtered and spat and sparked, coughing dust and smoke into the room. They made love. Late at night, they took cold showers in the communal showers together. They read naked in bed, dimpling their books with sweat. Sometimes they went down the street to Miguel Pachucho’s café, which was open all night, and which was a good place for watching drunks and whores and young lovers and the clinically insane. They stopped going to the Chinese restaurant because it was too long of a drive, and they couldn’t keep themselves apart for the drive there, a long meal, and the drive home.
   
One night, after their third time fucking, he turned to her.
   
“Does it stay like this forever?” he asked.
   
She laughed, as if it were a preposterous question.
   
He shrugged. “I’ve never been with anyone more than once. I have no idea.”
   
She looked at him as if she wanted to laugh again, but she touched his face instead.
   
“No, it doesn’t stay like this forever. At some point you’ll get tired of my body. You don’t believe it now, but you will, kid. And then I’ll get hurt by that. At some point we’ll fight and it will grow unbearable. Or you’ll find someone’s body that you want more. Or I’ll feel that I’m missing out on something, something I couldn’t name but feel in my bones is out there, waiting to be found.”
   
He thought about this and wasn’t sure what to say.
   
“So what’s the point,” he finally asked, “if there’s no hope?”
   
She laughed and kissed him on the stomach. “Good question.”
   
For the next two days, during which Octavia didn’t stop by, Xavi brooded about what she’d said. These were awful days, interminable and hot. The sounds of the city were sinister outside his window. He fought the constant urge to call her. He tried to write, but everything he wrote was morose and turgid. Finally she showed up. He told her about his concerns.
   
“Kid, you can’t worry about it. That’s not any way to live. It will happen when it happens. If you spend your time thinking about how everything will end, then you’re fucked from the beginning. And maybe it won’t happen. I don’t know. Isn’t that why we do it? Because we hope maybe this time will be different?”
   
He wasn’t convinced, but then she undressed slowly in the heat, a sultry and sweaty striptease that forced him to laugh. They fucked for a long time. She didn’t leave for three days. They made tortillas on his small hot plate. The city sounded normal again, discordant and calamitous, but not malicious in any way.

~

One of those nights he had a dream that he immediately forgot upon waking but that came to him in fragments over the course of the next day, like lines from a poem torn out and dispersed at random about his room.
   
He was at a dinner table with Octavia and his half sister. Or, Octavia was there with her grandparents he hadn’t met. And then his half sister arrived with her father, who he had also never met, but who greeted him like a very old acquaintance when he came through the door.
   
He undressed Octavia in her childhood bedroom. “When you look at your sister, your demeanor is that of a man in love,” she said. They stood there naked, not touching, a few feet apart.
   
The house had once been lavish but, in the dream, had become dilapidated.
   
He stood in the middle of a barren third world crossroads. Dirt roads intersecting. Shacks everywhere. A car came by and picked him up and took him to the house. Yes, this was how the dream began.
   
It surprised him when his half sister arrived for dinner. When she walked, they both had a moment where their hearts stopped. Octavia’s family watched them. "Do you two know each other?" someone asked, though Xavi didn‘t know who it was. "We're friends," he said, and they hugged, he and his half sister.
   
At some point he watched through a gigantic window, a window that was dirty and needed a thorough washing, while Octavia and his half sister sat with their toes dangling into a pool that was filled with dead leaves and murky water. Their backs were to him. They both undressed, though they didn’t undress each other. Octavia’s cunt was hairy and his half sister’s was shaved, and he liked the disparity between the two. His half sister lowered herself into the pool and performed oral sex on Octavia, who leaned back and went limp as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
   
There might have been a long digressive sequence, one of those dream interludes, where he set up tables for men in suits in a vast banquet hall that reminded him of a great Viking hall where Norse Gods feasted and drank wine, except if the great Viking hall had been built on the cheap by post-modernist American architects who wanted the place to look cutting edge for, at most, twenty years, at which point it would begin to fall apart and look terribly shabby and be deemed out-of-date and replaced.
   
He read a book while Octavia dressed herself. This was early in the dream, he thought. She told him she would be back for him later, but he grew impatient and he wandered through a fallow field full of dead, deliquescent plant husks. He got lost because he tried to navigate by the immense, unfettered sky. When he finally returned to the house - which was different than when he left, also in the way of dreams - it was much later than he’d been expected and he found everyone waiting for him, none-too-pleased.
   
The dream ended, he thought, with him walking into the kitchen of the house, which was completely different than it had been during dinner. It seemed the same cost-cutting American architects from the banquet hall had designed the kitchen, too. All of the lights were off but for an emergency light and he kept trying to turn the lights on but he couldn’t.
   
Sometime before that, in perhaps the dream’s penultimate scene, he reposed in a narrow hardwood hallway that he knew was connected to Octavia’s bedroom. His half sister came down the hallway. He didn’t remember what she was wearing, but she was clothed. “You’re leaving,” she said, “for a long time.” He nodded. She knelt down and kissed him once, formally, then kissed him again, much less formally. “Well, good bye then,” she said, and then she left and he was alone in the hallway.   

~

A postcard came from Mexico City. He didn’t find it until four days after it arrived.

Some of the boys are nine or ten, orphaned, or their
mothers work double shifts at the factory. At home
the boys watch endless television. They see their
brothers with girls. They see their brothers with
cars and they get letters from their fathers who’ve
gone to work in California. ‘I’ve not forgotten you,
Son.’ They know their mothers come home late stinking
of alcohol and sweat and cologne. Because of this the
boys are sought, and wanted. Hunted. ‘Nino, play a
game with us, a harmless game. If you see the narcos
you shout blackbird, you sing it, like you’re a little
bird yourself, but a good bird, an eagle.’ They hand
the boys fifty pesos, what their mothers make in
three days. ‘Just sing for me, ok? Just sing.’

~

In moments, brief moments, he looked at her and thought that if she vanished from his life, that if he were to never see her again, he would somehow remain whole, and unwounded. That maybe what they shared had no weight at all beyond its immediacy. That the sorrow he would feel at her loss would be one of rejection, and not absence. And that with time, her absence would be filled by other women, or by writing, until it was like a grave dug and buried over, the earth settled and the grass grown back, almost unrecognizable as a wound. What a wondrous thing, he thought, or a terrifying thing, that he could look at her and feel nothing but indifference. There were other moments when he couldn’t suppress the implacable feeling that she was still little more than a stranger. She lapsed into periods of inscrutability, when she was deeply involved in a poem, or a book. He wondered if some of her furtive smiles were memories of old lovers, aroused by a line or an image. It was the same with him, of course. Sometimes he remembered things seemingly at random, as if they had been plucked serendipitously from a vortex. One afternoon, sitting at his desk, a door slammed down the hall and he remembered watching his half-sister dance a crude ballet in their backyard, a sparkler fussily spewing in her left hand, carving the night with its contrail of light. A day later, he caught a scent of mold in the hallway and remembered his mother’s naked body, splayed open on their kitchen floor, passed out, the mysterious bruises on her droopy breasts, the inconsistent mottle of her pubic hair. He didn’t know where these came from. He didn’t know how he could explain them to her: why he had them, why they meant something to him. So, slowly, he finally accepted there were always aspects of people that remain closed, try as we might to open them.

He was also surprised, at times, by the waning of his desire. He’d spent so long wanting her. But there were times when she came at him, atavistic and feral, and he recoiled, unable to get hard. Or, they would fuck for hours and he would find himself thinking about poetry, or wondering where Tomas was, or studying the diaphanous cobwebs that latticed his window. At first it befuddled him. Eventually, though, he decided that, like Tomas told him the summer before, there was an uncomfortable truth to his desire. It required distance. It functioned best when the women were purely flesh and moisture. He had become conditioned to newness. He had become conditioned to his desire being constantly piqued, and it could only be fully sated by new provender. Then, she spread her legs and her pubic hair spilled softly out the sides of her panties. Or, she bent in a way that accentuated the hang of her breasts, the hardness of her nipple. And he chastised himself for taking such abundance for granted. But, the next day, he’d find himself distracted while he kissed her. He wondered what she thought about while fucking him. He wondered if there were days that she wanted other men, or that she found him boring. The only honest answer he could find was yes.
   
These questions, he decided, helped nothing. But he couldn’t help them.

~

He had an idea for a poem in that half second after waking. City as body. City as desecrated body with something malignant devouring its heart, or creeping in from the periphery, metastasizing. A second later it was gone, the whole poem. Octavia stood at the window, her back to him. He studied the firm muscles of her back, the fleshy indentations of her hips, the meridian of her spine. She smoked with her right hand. The lavender penumbra of dusk swam past beyond her head, her hair half up and half down, disheveled.
   
“These clouds are like fossils,” she said. “Like fossils scoured into soft stone.” She turned to him, profiled against the striated dusk. “Hey kid, I’ve gotta go.”
   
“Mm. Why? Stay.”
   
She knelt beside him and kissed him. “Can’t. Gotta go, kid.”
   
He spent the evening lolling about on the threshold of dreams. A girl stepped over and led him by the hand. He strolled with Melquiades amongst a graveyard of books never written. At first he thought the knock at the door came from his dream. The second knock brought him back. By the third knock - one, insistent rap of the knuckles, a cadence he remembered but couldn’t place - he was out of bed, and had thrown on a shirt. The room was dark, and he groped for a light before opening the door.
   
There, in the doorway, was a gaunt ghost. His hair was to his shoulder blades. He looked as if he’d fallen into the deepest hole on earth, and clawed his way out, inch by excruciating inch, with his fingernails.
   
It was Tomas.